


No Control

by SarcasticGhoul



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 12:43:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 30,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2270157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarcasticGhoul/pseuds/SarcasticGhoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When two criminals, who bear a striking resemblance to Jemma and Skye, are captured by Tony Stark, Coulson takes the opportunity to find out if rumors of corruption, experimentation, and torture are true in a high security prison by putting Jemma and Skye undercover and on the front lines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> For the AOS Big Bang. It kind of got away from me at a few points, so I'm not 100% happy with the final result, but HERE IT IS....  
> And, this is my first time posting anything at AO3, so chances I messed something up are very high.
> 
> The art accompanying this fic is by the awesome [gingermutantfreak](http://gingermutantfreak.tumblr.com)., which you can view [here](http://gingermutantfreak.tumblr.com/post/96808443451/my-contribution-for-aos-bigbang-for).
> 
> Warnings for language (maybe? I can't remember what dialogue was and wasn't used) and depictions of violence and torture in a later chapter.

Houston. Why did it have to be Houston? Well, of course it would be Houston, he really wasn’t fond of Houston and so it would just figure that something would happen while he was down there.

Tony Stark had flown down to the city the day before for a meeting that had gone perfectly fine, albeit extremely boringly. There was another meeting scheduled for two days following, which was fine and everything, except that he didn’t like Houston.

There wasn’t any particular reason why, it just...it was Houston. What was so great about Houston?

Well, it turned out it wasn’t as boring of a place as he had always thought. The day before his second meeting, he got an alert about two supposed terrorists targeting a corporate building within the city. Hostages. Bombs. The whole deal.

Needing time to kill--and because it was the right thing to do of course--he decided to suit up and flew over to assess the situation.

The situation was exactly as it appeared. Terrorists. Hostages. Bombs. But no demands had been made. Nobody knew why the terrorists were there, if for any other reason than to just cause terror.

Another interesting point to note was that there were only two of them.  Two women that had never popped up on any alerts before. Two names that Tony didn't recognize. The fact that there wasn’t a group of terrorists caused Tony to wonder how they had taken an entire building on their own.

He had Jarvis hack into the security camera feed to get a better look at what was going on inside. Really, nothing more was going on than it appeared from outside. The two claimed terrorists were clearly bickering with each other, but other than that nothing was happening. Tony observed for a few moments, then had Jarvis locate the bomb using their radio frequency that was normally reserved for the bombs' detonator and promptly diffused them one by one before the two hostiles on the uppermost floor had any idea anyone had even determined their location.

Once the bombs were disabled, the Iron Man simply flew back up, and made his grand entrance through the ceiling, thoroughly startling the hostiles and hostages.

There was no real fight. Not really. The two women didn’t surrender immediately, but they clearly hadn’t been expecting Iron Man to show up, and the man in the iron suit's sudden appearance had startled them. It was all over before it had any real chance to get started, and Tony was escorting the two women back down to the ground floor of the building.

He was leading them to the elevator, and had just opened his mouth to command Jarvis to patch him through to the authorities waiting below to inform them to come retrieve the hostages, but before he knew what had happened, something grappled onto his helmet and began applying extreme pressure, enough to cause the warnings and alerts to flare up. It slowly spread to the rest of the suit, essentially freezing him.

“Jarvis! What’s going on?” Tony frantically tried to break free of whatever was holding him, to no avail. He couldn't grasp onto whatever it was grabbing onto him.

“It appears a strong force is rendering you immobile.”

“Yeah, and what force would that be?”

“The force is of unknown origin.”

There were very few things in this world that Jarvis couldn’t analyze. The fact that he couldn’t determine what was currently latching onto Tony’s helmet was quite concerning.

“Where is it coming from?” Tony asked frantically as he tried to tug away whatever was holding him, the two women all but forgotten in the moment. His determined struggle to free himself seemed to work for a moment, but the force snapped back to him like a rubber band the moment he got too far.

The A.I. took control of Tony’s heads up display momentarily to bring up a 360 degree visual and highlighted the person standing in front of him.

“One of those women?” But they were just normal women. Crazed, hostile, women with terrorist-tendencies, but just human. They weren’t aliens, they hadn’t been equipped with any sort of extraterrestrial or advanced weaponry, so what was this?

“Warning: incoming electrical surge.”

Suddenly, something wrapped around Tony’s forearm and caused a wave of electricity to branch up and down it, causing the suit's system to glitch before his eyes. He looked down at what was holding his arm and his eyes widened as he saw what it was. That looks like…

“The device appears to be similar to the design of Scientist Ivan Vanko.”

Jarvis was right. The whip holding his arm was very similar to Ivan Vanko’s design. But it wasn’t plasma, it was just electricity. Where had it come from? Again, Jarvis hadn't analyzed the weapon beforehand, so how did they manage to hide it?

Tony wrapped his arm around the whip, taking a firm grasp of it, and swung its wielder into the woman who was apparently causing the pressure that was beginning to dent his helmet. As soon as the woman wielding the electrical whip crashed into the other, the pressure lifted, freeing Tony.

Immediately he aimed both repulsor beams at the women.

“Who the hell are you two?”

The women looked up and saw the glowing palms of Iron Man’s hands aimed at them. They rose slowly to their feet, careful not to make any sudden movements that would cause him to fire.

“Two women with a grudge,” The darker-haired woman, the one responsible for that unknown force, responded darkly.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Turn around and start walking.”

“Where are you expecting to take us, big guy?” The other woman asked, though she still followed his order and turned, “I’m sure you can tell by now that we’d be able to handle any prison you put us.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Sparky. Start walking.”


	2. Chapter 2

“But why do they have to go? Alone?”  


“Because it’s a penitentiary, Fitz, inmates aren’t exactly provided a ‘plus one’ option,” Coulson stated this information matter-of-factly without looking up from the screen he was observing, currently compiling information that he would brief the entire team with shortly.  


“So why not send May?” The young agent pressed.  


“They’re going undercover, and they both fit the general description of each target. If we had conveniently just apprehended two criminals whose profiles Agents Trip and May better matched, I would be sending them in instead,” The recently-appointed director of S.H.I.E.L.D. clarified, glancing up finally, albeit briefly before his gaze returned to the screen.

“But Skye and Jemma…they’re not…criminals,” Fitz flailed his hands ever so slightly in a gesture of placation. Coulson looked back up at him, a thoughtful expression crossing his features for a moment before he responded, “You’re right, they’re not. But they don’t have to be—”  
Fitz opened his mouth to attempt to convince Coulson further, but the director held up a hand, effectively silencing the younger man as he continued after the almost-interruption, “They will be fine, Fitz. May and Trip will be on stand-by the entire time. If I can get one, or even both, of them into a position to infiltrate as a member of staff and provide as much security for Jemma and Skye as possible, I will. But even if that’s not an option, you’ll be keeping an eye on them through the security system, and if anything goes wrong, we will know, and we will be there.”

Fitz tightened his jaw as he rolled Coulson’s words around in his head. He knew Coulson would take all manner of precautions, but still, there were just some things that couldn’t be accounted for, couldn’t be predicted, expected, or planned for, and those were the things that he was worried about. But he knew it would be futile to argue further, and really, he wasn’t entirely sure why he was arguing…or, rather, attempting to argue with Coulson on why Jemma and Skye shouldn’t be going undercover into high security prison for very powerful and bad people. Obviously it would be dangerous, but really, their entire lives were dangerous at that point, this would be on the lower end of the scale of things actually.

After a few moments, Fitz let out a breath and looked down slightly, “Yes sir.”

The dejection in the young man’s voice caused Coulson to look up at him again. The senior agent paused before adding, a bit more gently, “Have faith in them, Fitz. They are both brilliant girls, and while they don’t have much experience, their instincts more than make up for that.”  
Fitz nodded, but didn’t say anything and silently turned around and left.

\---

“I mean, what should I bring, what will I need? I’ve never really been on a mission like this…well, not on the front lines like this. Normally it’s just Fitz and I on the back lines together. I wonder how he will be; he’ll be fine you think, right?” Jemma barely glanced up from the suitcase she was packing full of random things that she thought may or may not be necessary, only to moments later take an item out to be replaced with something deemed even more important in her mind. Skye just watched her, hand against her chin propping her head up, sitting about a foot away from the suitcase the genius was packing, watching silently, though her amusement practically radiated off of her. She wondered how long it would take this genius to figure out that one, very important, fact about their mission that she hadn’t seemed to fully wrap her mind around yet.

The overly-energized scientist didn’t even wait for the hacker to respond to her question about their comrade as she steamrolled on through the thoughts running rampant through her own head, “It’s just…it’s just so exciting though. I mean, being trusted like this, and relied upon. I mean, I know my role to the team is important and vital, both Fitz and I know that very well don’t get me wrong,” She gave Skye a look that the computer-genius knew was meant to stress that fact, “But it’s so hard sometimes, watching everyone else run around, dodging bullets—sometimes literally—while we sit back and twiddle our thumbs. I wouldn’t want to be in many of those situations myself, not because I’m frightened exactly, I’m perfectly prepared to do anything necessary…” Her voice trailed off slightly as she paused, glancing at Skye who smiled and nodded in a way that told her that she didn’t need to defend her own bravery, which, to Skye, she didn’t. Skye had witnessed the plethora of things the other woman had done in the time they had known each other. Skye had absolutely no reason to doubt her bravery, no one on the team had any reason to do so, and nobody on the team did.

Jemma took a breath, wringing the pair of socks she was currently holding as she gave her mind a moment to catch up and better formulate her thoughts into more appropriate sentences, “I’m simply aware of where my skillset lies. But due to that, sometimes it just feels like I’m not doing enough.”  
Her gaze returned to the woman sitting on her bed, looking for some sign that she understood without needing any further kind of elaboration, and once again Skye nodded gently. She perfectly understood the point Jemma was trying to get across without seeming able to fully put it into words. Skye had rifled through plenty of those same feelings many times before. All of them probably had moments like that, where they wished they could do more but just…couldn’t because they didn’t know how and they really did know that their inexperience in those situations would just slow the rest of the team down, but that knowledge only served to make them feel helpless, and that was never a nice feeling.

Jemma’s gaze slowly lowered to her suitcase again, and she lowered her hands, softly placing the pair of socks amongst the other items already occupying space within the luggage container without releasing them. Her brow furrowed at the same time.  
“What am I doing?” She murmured, more to herself than Skye. The doctor lifted her head to stare at the wall in front of her, crinkling her nose in distaste at herself and her own naivety before she looked at Skye, “We’re not going to summer camp,” Skye smirked as their mission’s location finally dawned on Jemma, “Why am I packing. They won’t allow us to take anything in with us.” The expression of amusement on Skye’s face only grew, and Jemma’s eyes narrowed as she lifted her hand and whacked the hacker on the arm with her pair of socks, “Why didn’t you stop me? I’ve been wasting all of this time when you could have just pointed out…”

Skye feigned defending herself against Jemma’s attack with her socks, laughing, “You were in a zone, I was afraid to break you out of it.”

They both stopped when Trip popped his head into the pod, informing them that the briefing would be starting momentarily. Both girls nodded and Skye stood up and led the way out of Jemma’s pod, the scientist plopping her unneeded pair of socks onto her unneeded suitcase before following the other girl.  
As they stepped over to the allotted location a short distance away from the pod, where Coulson and Trip were already located, the rest of their teammates emerged one by one from separate directions of the Bus.

Once everyone was there, without further adieu, Coulson began the brief of the mission, “At 16:00 hours yesterday, two criminals were apprehended by Tony Stark in Houston. Both criminals are too dangerous to be placed in a normal correctional facility, but a few years ago S.H.I.E.L.D., the United States Government, and the United Nations worked together in an extremely rare partnership, with the result of creating a prison specifically designed to hold criminals deemed too dangerous for a regular correctional facility.”  
As he spoke, Coulson had brought up files on the screen that stretched the length of the holotable, and he brought up the architectural specs of the prison in question.

“Ryker’s Island, located in New York on a small manmade island in the East River between Queens and Manhattan,” At this point, he pulled up a map of New York City that had a circle indicating the location of the prison. Trip broke in, “What about the Vault, the Cube?” Coulson’s jaw tightened minutely, May glanced at Trip, and Fitz, Jemma, and Skye looked at their three senior agents with questioning looks.

“The Vault and Cube were S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities, confidential to anyone under Level 6 access,” Coulson informed the three younger teammates and turned his attention to Trip to answer his question, “Since HYDRA surfaced and S.H.I.E.L.D. was disbanded, both facilities were shut down by the U.S. government. There’s a chance they may reopen the Vault as a military facility, but as of right now it has nothing to do with us. Ryker’s Island remained functioning because it is under U.N. authority. While S.H.I.E.L.D. has partnered closely with the U.S. government and U.N. in the past to provide the best security for the facility, S.H.I.E.L.D. had little else to do with the facility’s operation.”

“So what happened to the inmates at the other prisons?” Trip pressed, a faint hint of concern entering his voice. A similar hint of concern flashed through May’s eyes for a split second that revealed she had come to a similar conclusion as him and feared the next words Coulson would say.  
Coulson hesitated, but responded nonetheless, “They were all moved to Ryker’s Island.”

Having their suspicions proven accurate, both May and Trip looked slightly uncomfortable with this information. For Trip, that wasn’t so surprising, but May had a knack of hiding things like that, and the fact that the news disturbed May caused Jemma, Fitz, and Skye’s anxiety to mount.

“So what? Why is that such a big deal?” Skye blurted out, looking between the three older members of their team.

Coulson seemed even more hesitant to elaborate, and Trip couldn’t seem to find the right words, so May answered Skye’s question bluntly, “It means that Ryker’s Island is filled with men and women far more dangerous than average criminals. Not just for the crimes they’ve committed, but for abilities a number of them possess.”

“What do you mean by ‘abilities’?” Jemma questioned slowly.

Trip answered the scientist’ question, “Anything. Ranging from sheer mental brilliance to superhuman capabilities. Not only that, but with the Cube shut down, you’ll also have alien criminals.”

“Alien criminals? Like…Asgardians? I thought they were all returned to Asgard to be handled,” Fitz commented.  
Before Trip could elaborate, May broke back in, “Long story short, Ryker’s Island is going to be filled to capacity with extremely dangerous criminals and it’s most likely understaffed.”

The three young teammates were all on the verge of bursting with questions at this point, but before any of them could ask anything further, Coulson shoved his way back into the position of authority over the conversation, “May is correct. The facility is filled to capacity, and it is overwhelmingly understaffed, which gives the inmates a length of leash that none of them should have. If that wasn’t bad enough, we have information that suggests a portion of the faculty might be corrupt. There are rumors of bribery, experimentation, even torture. While I haven’t been given any solid facts to back any of these allegations up, the possibility that they may be true cannot be thrown out. That returns us to the missions,” Coulson brought up two files on the screen, “Jemma and Skye will infiltrate the prison impersonating the two criminals that Tony Stark captured yesterday. Skye will be posing as Tanya Sealy, codename ‘Black Mamba’,” Skye’s full attention fell to the screen as Coulson opened up one of the files and revealed an assortment of information on said-woman, along with a photograph. Skye frowned thoughtfully as she inspected the photo. She and ‘Black Mamba’ shared a few basic characteristics—dark hair, apparently they were the same height and right around the same weight, and she was only a few years older than Skye—but the agent didn’t think they looked similar enough that anyone would necessarily mix them up.

“Are you sure…?” Skye lifted her gaze to look at Coulson, and he nodded, “Yes, Skye. Side by side, no one would mistake the two of you. But we won’t have you side by side, and nobody would recognize you or her on sight. You match her general appearance, and that will be enough to fool anyone in the prison.”  
Skye was skeptical, but she nodded her understanding, placing her faith in Coulson’s decision.

Coulson looked back down at the screen as he opened the second file, “Jemma will be posing as Leeann Foreman, codename ‘Whiplash’.” Skye glanced over and watched as Jemma’s eyes widened at the revealed picture of her target. The woman Jemma would be posing as looked angry and wild in her picture. The woman’s hair was a bit lighter than Jemma’s, but they seemed to have extremely similar physiques—according to the picture at least. Jemma’s concern rested entirely with the fact that…well…Leann Foreman looked like a wildwoman. And while she could get pretty crazy on game night when the cards of Cards Against Humanity started falling, she had a feeling that this woman was on an entirely separate level.

Out of all the things she could have asked, all the worries she could have revealed, the only words that haltingly left her mouth were, “She’s an American.” Jemma swallowed and looked up at Coulson as he nodded, “Yes, which means you’ll have to practice your American accent.”

She didn’t object, only nodded as she looked back down at the information. Skye watched her all the while, and the other girl’s uncertainty with this whole thing was stunningly obvious to her. Jemma had been so excited only minutes earlier but now…now the reality of it was all setting in. Skye had to admit she was starting to feel the nerves as well, and the little pep talk about what sort of people they would encounter in the prison didn’t help at all.

Coulson pressed on before the two girls could get too caught up in their anxieties, “Black Mamba is known to have received mutagenic alterations that, supposedly, have given her some sort of powers, although we aren’t quite certain what kind, and Stark didn’t mention her using them when he captured her. However, to keep Skye from having to pretend she has any sort of power, we’ll place an electronic collar around your neck that we’ll say mutes your powers. Fitz has designed the collar to actually serve as a panic button. When security scans you, it won’t let off any electricity spikes or anything that would be abnormal to its supposed task.”

Everyone was silent as Coulson flipped through files on the screen to continue the briefing, and just before he opened his mouth to continue, Skye blurted out, “Wait!”

Everyone looked at her and she continued, “Does that mean…we’re going to be alone in there?”

Coulson considered his words carefully before he answered, “We don’t know what members of the faculty are corrupt or not, if any, and we can’t take any chances. From the moment we hand you two over, you cannot break character for anyone. But you will not be alone. May and Trip will be stationed just on the Queens side of the River, and Fitz will be monitoring the prison through the security system the entire time. You activate the panic on your collar, or Fitz sees anything go wrong, and Trip and May will be there in minutes.”

“Why can’t we just go to the United Nations or United States Government?” Jemma asked, “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t want to help if they found out about these rumors.”

“That’s the problem. We’ve tried. They don’t believe us, or they don’t care to believe us. Ryker’s Island isn’t a correctional facility. The government, the U.N., they aren’t interested in rehabilitation. Ryker’s Island is the new world’s garbage disposal for criminals. They don’t care what happens to the inmates once they’re put there. That’s why I’m a bit more inclined to lean towards the side of belief when it comes to these rumors.”

“Why do we care?” Trip asked suddenly and all eyes turned to him, save for May’s, whose remained on the information presented to them on the screen.  
“Why should we care? It’s not a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, and these people have received life-sentences for the crimes they’ve committed—”

“Because the world doesn’t know how to handle them,” Coulson answered, his voice becoming sharp, “Many of them haven’t committed crimes that would earn a person a life sentence. But instead of dealing with them, of trying to harness their potential to help the world, they’ve just been thrown into this prison to rot. And now it’s rumored that they aren’t even receiving that slight peace, but instead are being experimented on and tortured? This is not up for debate. Yes, they are extremely dangerous individuals, but they are not monsters, not all of them.”

That last comment didn’t escape either of Jemma or Skye’s notice, but neither of them brought it up for elaboration.

“So…what exactly is our mission?” Skye finally asked slowly.

“To observe. To find out what’s going on, if anything. Communicate with the other inmates, communicate with the guards. We have a plan to get you out in a week, but your stay will be determinate on if you find anything or if anything goes wrong.”

“Grand,” Skye muttered. Jemma visibly blanched, but remained very quiet.

The rest of the brief was spent going over May, Trip, and Fitz’s roles in the entire thing, along with the coordination of escape possibilities and their extraction options, but both Jemma and Skye only listened with half of their attention at that point, both girls going over a thousand different points, worries, scenarios, variables in their heads.

“Jemma,” The scientist’s head shot up when her name was spoken, a blush rising to her cheeks that did little to hide the fact that she hadn’t been paying very good attention to Coulson’s words up until that point. He didn’t comment as he stated, “May will help you with your accent and undercover work. She’ll also train you in the very basics of hand-to-hand combat so that you will not be going in helpless. Skye,” Coulson turned his head to the other girl, “Trip will continue your training and Fitz will go over the collar with you. Both of you must go over these files in detail and have it memorized as quickly and thoroughly as possible. I’ll quiz you both on the information in the morning.”

Coulson was just about to dismiss the team when Jemma asked, “When will we be arriving at Ryker’s Island, sir?”  
“21:00 hours. Tomorrow.”

Jemma and Skye exchanged a look verging on panic. That gave them just over 24 hours to prepare. Coulson dismissed them, and everyone went their separate ways. Jemma wandered back towards her pod with slow steps, like she was in a kind of trance, only stopping when May requested Jemma to meet her down in the hanger in ten minutes.

Skye was the only one who stayed behind, staring at Coulson as he pointedly flipped through the files, feeling her gaze on him but keeping his eyes trained down.

“How are we supposed to become these two super-criminal women in 24 hours?” Skye demanded, “How are we supposed to learn everything we should and completely abandon ourselves to get into those mindsets in—”

“Agent Romanoff can ‘get into that mindset’ in less than an hour after her briefing,” Coulson stated sharply, finally looking up at her.  
Skye gaped at him, “Yeah, and neither Jemma or I are anywhere near to being on the same level as Agent Romanoff! She has years of training on both of us even combined, and Jemma isn’t even a field agent!”

“No, she’s not. And if I had two field agents with better qualifications that matched the physical appearance of the two targets I would be sending them, but I don’t have any other options.”

Skye stared at him, and then her brow furrowed as she really looked at him. While his tone was stern, he wasn’t angry. And then it hit her. He was putting on a façade of being the strict director and leader, but he was worried. He was just as worried as the rest of them were with this whole situation.

“Skye,” His expression softened, “I know you two can do this. I know I’m asking a lot, but I wouldn’t be putting you in this position if I didn’t think you could do it.”

The hacker bit her lip softly as her gaze averted to the screen.  
“You might want to tell Jemma that, I’m pretty sure she’s close to freaking out,” Skye smiled weakly. Coulson smiled as well, “That’s why I partnered her with May.”


	3. Chapter 3

The guard was waiting to cuff Skye's hands again the moment she stepped through the metal detector, trying to hide the sick enjoyment he was getting throughout this entire process with an unimpressed mask. It was enough to cause the hacker to grimace to herself, though she tried to keep her own expression from triggering any sort of unwanted response from the man. Maybe under normal circumstances she would have come up with some witty retort to call the guy out on his creepy behavior but as it was, she wasn't keen about the idea of getting into trouble. Not with the position she and Jemma were currently in. Not when she had no idea what, exactly, the repercussions for any of their actions could potentially be.

They hadn't been required to remove the collar from her neck due to the entirely plastic makeup of it, though they probably wouldn't have chanced taking it off even if it had been metal. They did run a handheld device over it, almost like a handheld metal detector, but it was searching for something other than metal. Apparently, whatever results they got from the device, they were satisfied with because the security guard waved her through and she sulkingly rejoined her own guard, holding out her wrists without needing to be asked.

Jemma passed through the detector next. She had her own guard as well, who waited next to Skye and her guard, but he was enjoying this entire process far less and, glancing at him closely as subtly as she could manage, Skye realized that he seemed almost...afraid of Jemma. The idea almost made Skye scoff, but she managed to turn it into a cough instead. Skye was thoroughly certain that Jemma would find the idea of a prison guard being frightened of her just as amusing as Skye did. But, in the guy's defense, he didn't know she was really Jemma Simmons. He only knew her as some extremely dangerous criminal. Skye didn't know the details of Jemma's target, just that she was as dangerous as Skye's own, and Skye was sure that Jemma knew just as little about the hacker's target. They'd barely had enough time to learn their own files, let alone each other's.

Skye had tried to ask Jemma a few questions, but Jemma built a kind of wall inside of herself and wouldn't talk about her file. She had been completely normal otherwise, but just when it came to her alias, she avoided the subject entirely until she had been required to get into character, so to speak, at which point she did just that and still didn't actually talk about the file.

May had vaguely explained to Skye Jemma's tactic for their mission, and from what Skye understood it was all just a way to cope. Jemma and her designated alias were so completely different, and Jemma's alias was such a moral contrast to herself, that she couldn't allow that facade to bleed through into her own self for even a moment. While some people could find similarities between themselves and their 'character' in order to make a stronger bond, May and Jemma had quickly established that such a tactic wouldn't work for Jemma, whether she and the woman in her file had any similarities or not.

Skye understood it, most of it at least, but it had still been strange in the hours leading up to the mission. Jemma had just been so distant and hollow. And then she had 'gotten into character', and she didn't really change. Not to Skye at least. To Skye she was still Jemma, but to everyone else she was Leeann Foreman.

Right then, for example. Jemma's gaze unwaveringly held the security guard's next to the metal detector with a deadly determination, but the moment her eyes met Skye's, her gaze softened for a split second and she was Jemma again, if only for that moment. It was enough to steady Skye, but then Jemma’s eyes flicked back over to the security guard as he ushered her onward, and that darkness returned. So maybe it was still strange, seeing Jemma act like that, even if it was just an act...actually, it was verging on baffling to see Jemma acting like that. Skye had faith that Jemma would be able to pull this off...but to see her now, actually in action, and without missing any beats...it was impressive, mostly due to the fact that Skye knew how hard it must be for the other girl.

But she only needed to keep it up while the guards were around. Once they were left alone among the other inmates, Jemma would be able to relax substantially. Kind of. The inmates would pose a new threat of course, but a different threat than the guards.It was almost as if they were going to...well...going to high school. The guards were the teachers, and the other inmates were their classmates. People acted differently around their peers than they did figures of authority, and both Skye and Jemma were grappling onto the hope that concept provided in the form of being allowed a bit more slack when it came to their covers. Coulson had gone over that concept specifically with both of them shortly before they dispatched for the mission, it was why he had such faith in them and their ability to pull this off. They didn’t necessarily need to have bullet proof covers and know those covers with a 0% margin for error. According to their intelligence, none of the other prisoners had ever come into contact with Black Mamba or Whiplash, which meant none of the other prisoners knew how they were supposed to act or would notice if they weren’t acting like themselves.

However, that didn’t mean that they could go gallivanting around as one ex-hacktivist-turned-secret-agent and one super-brilliant-doctor-who’s-really-English-and-not-American. It just meant that they could, well...they could fudge it a little bit.

The files they had studied and memorized like the back of their own hands, those hadn’t been the entire stories. Those files had been the bare bones of the women they would be posing as, and that was all either of them had when it came to factual truth. The rest they needed to flesh out on their own.

“Keep things straightforward. Never throw in too many details, keep it simple. The less you share, the less you have to keep memorized for later.”

That was what Coulson had told them both. One of the worst things that could happen was that one of them could get caught up in a lie. So to avoid that, they needed to keep everything they told anyone while they were undercover locked away in their memory. Their fake father’s middle name, how their fake cat from when they were little had been hit by a car and died, the street they had been born on...those were just some examples of details they would opt to leave out of discussions. They were miniscule details that weren’t worth mentioning, let alone worth risking the entire operation on conceiving and memorizing.

Once Jemma was handcuffed again, just like Skye, they were led from the entry-point security station down a corridor, through a handful of gated checkpoints with electronic locks, key locks, and remote locks accessed by different guards watching from some monitor somewhere else in the facility.The deeper they went, the more lost Skye felt. It didn’t take long for her to feel completely turned around, and a small bubble of panic burst deep inside of her, though she took a deep breath to quell it quickly.

A glance over showed Skye that Jemma was less panicked by the layout of the facility. Actually, the determined expression on her face, and the way her eyes jumped around almost analytically told Skye that Jemma was memorizing the layout as they walked through it, and Skye smirked to herself, tilting her head down a bit to hide it from the guards until she could compose her features again. Maybe Jemma had difficulties with the acting and lying parts of things, but she was brilliant, and she could memorize most things in a breeze. Actually, memorizing the file she had been given was probably going to have been the easiest part of the mission for her. It was a comforting thought, knowing that Jemma was processing everything they saw away for later.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they passed through the last checkpoint, and the moment the gate opened they were greeted with a large corridor of barred bunks that stetched up three stories above them. A low, nondescript hum of activity electrified the place from the chatter and actions of the inmates, but periodically there would be spikes of noise in the form of shouts, crashes, or other such  noises.

However, that him was thoroughly disrupted the moment the inmates locked inside their bunks caught sight of the two girls being escorted. The hum slowly began to grow to a roar as whistles and shouts filled the air, all directed at Skye and Jemma.

"Looks like you two are going to be pretty popular among the dogs here," Skye's guard commented with a smirk, making no move to interrupt the male inmates' vocal harassment of the two young women.

For a very troubling split second, Skye worried that the prison wasn't divided between men and women at all, but common sense won out over her fear when she noticed that there weren't any women in this corridor--other than Skye and Jemma that was--and  Jemma's guard slightly confirmed Skye's observation when he stated, "The women and men are divided into separate housing wings. But you share the same rec area and cafeteria."

So at least they wouldn't have to worry about bunking with the men. Although, from the things Skye had heard in her avid studying of prison life in the form of movies, t.v. shows, and literature, that didn't make a huge difference in the area where it mattered the most.

At the end of the corridor, it split off to the left and right. To the right was another,  similar corridor with three levels of bunks, to the left was an alcove-like space, which was where a staircase could be found that led up to the higher bunk-levels.

They turned right and continued walking. At the end of that corridor was a wall of bars, a locked gate marking entry and exit points through each level.

There was another guard passing through the gate on the ground floor, and he raised one hand in greeting while keeping the gate from closing and locking with his other.

"Kurt! What the hell is going on that's got them so--oh," The guard cut himself off when Jemma's guard stepped to the side to allow the other three through the gate first, it being only large enough for them to pass single-file through it, and the new guard caught sight of the two girls that his compatriots were escorting.

"Yep," Skye's guard nodded, a smirk on his face, as he hesitated in front of the gate, forcing Skye, Jemma, and her guard to wait on him as he chatted with his coworker.

Jemma's guard did nothing to rush the other men, standing behind the two girls silently as his gaze wandered around the corridor, watching for any signs of trouble.

"Hey!" Skye pointedly ignored the man standing against the bars of his bunk to their right, repeating the mantra over in her head, ‘don’t make eye contact, don’t acknowledge them, don’t encourage them...’

"Hey! Strawberry!"

Skye arched a brow. Who was strawberry? She couldn’t help but glance over at the man to see who he was talking to. He was staring intently at Jemma. Skye glanced over her shoulder back at the scientist, who was watching the man with an extremely unimpressed expression, and it dawned on Skye suddenly. The scientist had been required to dye her hair for the mission, but in dim lighting her hair didn't look very different, maybe a bit darker actually.

However, standing in the corridor, waiting for Skye's guard, Kurt, to finish his leisurely chat, there was a streak of light from a skylight above shining down onto them, and looking at Jemma Skye saw that the newly added red-tone to her hair was very hard to miss.

The hacker turned her attention back to the man behind the bars, and taking a good look at him she noticed one very profound detail about him. He was short and not very imposing at all. Nothing about him screamed ‘extremely dangerous criminal’, except maybe his personality, which he was about to display.

He was sneering at Jemma, his beady eyes flashing with excitement, and Skye could almost see the thick layer of sweat forming on his hands. "You look like one of them girls who'd be pretty kinky in bed," He paused dramatically as he pretended to think for a moment before continuing, "Choking. I bet you're one of them freaks that likes to be choked in bed, which is great because choking women excites me, strawberry."

That was great. Skye frowned distastefully, and was ready to continue ignoring the man when Jemma surprisingly spoke up, "Fat chance. I don't think you could even reach my throat, short stack."

Skye arched a brow at the other girl. There had been the slightest hesitation before Jemma had insulted the man's height, and that hesitation paired with the insult Jemma had chosen was almost enough to make Skye giggle because it was just so...Jemma. The bio-chemist had said it smoothly enough for anyone else not to notice, but out of all the crude and less innocent things she could have thrown back at the guy, she chose that. Add on top of that the way Jemma needed to speak in there to pass as American, and it was just ridiculously adorable

The man seemed unfazed by the insult and only seemed encouraged by it as his smile grew and he shrugged a shoulder indifferently to his height, "Strawberry shortcake, delicious."

Now Jemma's face distorted into one of distaste and she rolled her eyes as she looked away and back straight ahead. The man guffawed and Skye glared at him. He winked at her, but it was clear he didn't hold nearly the same interest in Skye as in Jemma.

Luckily, they weren't subjected to the prisoner's company for a moment longer as Kurt finished his chat and bid his comrade adieu before leading the way through the gate. Jemma's guard ushered the two girls forward, though they didn't really need any encouragement, and glanced at the man behind the bars as he turned around to make sure the gate latched shut behind them, but said nothing.


	4. Chapter 4

“Bunk 31 C!” Skye’s guard shoved both girls in through a door that Jemma’s guard had opened after he had unhandcuffed the both of them.

“This will be your new home for the rest of your pathetic lives, unless you do something to displease the warden, in which case you’ll be given a much cozier little solitary room,” Skye’s guard stated cheerfully, and with that the door slammed shut and was locked, leaving Skye and Jemma alone with their three new bunkmates.

“Great, fresh meat,” One of the other women stated, sarcasm dripping from her words.

“Aw, Rawson, you said no one would be coming for at least three more days!” Another one, who had appeared to be napping on one of the top bunks, complained.

The first woman, ‘Rawson’, punched the bottom of the bunk above her own and responded sharply, “Don’t blame me, Forte, it usually takes a week for them to get new inmates relocated to open space!”

The third, and last, woman climbed from her own bunk, the only one that wasn’t a bunk bed, and stepped over to Skye and Jemma. She eyed them both, but not in a way that Skye thought was hostile, more just in analysis of them both.

Jemma watched the other two women, Rawson and Forte, as they bickered across the tiny room, and Skye held the third woman’s gaze unwaveringly as she approached.

“What’re you two in for?”

“What’s it matter to you?” Skye responded, Jemma glanced at her, then the other woman, but remained silent.

“Couldn’t have been too serious if you’re with us,” Forte piped up, pausing in her petty argument with Rawson.

The woman in front of Skye glanced back at the other inmate, then turned back to Skye and nodded, “Yeah, but fine if you don’t want to tell us, don’t. What’s with the ugly jewelry?” She looked pointedly down at Skye’s collar. Skye glared at her, and she rolled her eyes.

“Fine, sensitive. You’ll get over that attitude pretty fast. There’s not much else to do in this shithole but share your life story with anyone who’ll listen,” She turned and walked back over to her bunk.

“So, what? That’s it? We just sit in here all day?” Jemma finally asked. Skye glanced over at her, her brow furrowing slightly. It was odd hearing Jemma talk in a voice that wasn’t...hers. Jemma was speaking in an odd sort of accent that passed as oddly southern--it turned out it was just easier for her to talk in a different accent than to try and completely cover up her own. At first, Skye had found it quite comical, and maybe it still was a bit, but the more time they spent in here, the more Skye just missed Jemma’s accent.

“Pretty much, Red,” Skye looked back over at the woman as she answered Jemma. Jemma seemed put off by the nickname. Her hair wasn’t that red.

“We get let out in the morning to the cafeteria to eat breakfast, and after that we get rec time in the yard or rec-room depending on the weather. Then we get put back in here, then we repeat the process for lunch and dinner.”

“Everyone at the same time?”

Rawson was the one to reply next, “Nah, they do it blocks A through D in that order that Dubiel just told ya, and E through H do it backwards.”

Jemma nodded her understanding.

“Yeah, so it’s kind of like you’re back in school!” Forte declared happily from the top bunk.

“Maybe a little more fun, even,” Rawson agreed, and there wasn’t an ounce of sarcasm to be found in her words, which made Skye frown. She highly doubted that. Jemma, who very much enjoyed school, really doubted that.

“You two can have that bunk over there, it’s the only one open anyway,” Dubiel stated, relaxing onto her back on her own bed.

“Yeah, just...don’t get freaky or anything. You got three roommates now, and none of us want to hear that shit,” Rawson stated, and Skye and Jemma both looked at her for a second, before looking at each other, and chose to not acknowledge that comment at all as they both silent turned and stepped over to the vacant bunk bed.

“How do you know we even know each other?” Skye asked suddenly.

“Well, do you?”

Jemma and Skye exchanged another look and then Skye nodded, but before the other woman could respond continued, “What makes you think we’re together?”

“Well, are you?”

“None of your damn business,” Jemma answered immediately without hesitation and Skye’s eyes widened in surprise as all eyes turned to the scientist, who was absentmindedly making both beds--the sheets having been folded up at the foot of each.

“Oh, okay, sorry,” Rawson replied sarcastically as she rolled onto her back, chuckling to herself softly.

“You good?” The hacker asked the scientist softly, and Jemma turned to her questioningly, “Yes, why?”

Skye shrugged and shook her head, stepping forward to help the other girl with the sheets, “No reason. Do you want top?” Jemma shook her head instantly.

“I always fell off the top bunk when I went to  camp as a child,” Jemma admitted with a shrug and Skye smirked as she nodded, “I’ll take top then.”

Skye barely got the words out before the light cut out in the room, and in the hallway they could tell from the lack of glow through the crack between the door and its frame..

“What--” Skye looked around.

“Lights out, time for bed,” Dubiel stated, unfazed.

Skye scrambled to the top bunk as carefully as she could, and once she was settled she felt Jemma’s hand on her arm.

“Night,” The scientist whispered softly.

Skye smiled, though the other girl couldn’t see it. Maybe they weren’t in great circumstances, but at least they were together, and it was comforting having Jemma there instead of being forced to go through this mission alone.

“Good night.”


	5. Chapter 5

Skye was jolted awake the following morning by the sound of a loud buzzer and a voice screeching across the PA system that the morning count would commence in five minutes. The other three women in the small room that served as their living quarters scrambled from their beds, stashing things away under their covers, beneath their mattresses, or anywhere that could serve as a decent hiding place. Skye had no idea what they could be stashing, or where they would have gotten whatever it was they were stashing, but she didn’t exactly plan to be in the place long enough to find out the answers to those questions.

Jemma was wide awake, the hacker found as she climbed down the ladder. She had a panicked look in her eyes that was almost entirely snuffed out by an expression of dread. The scientist had just gone through that moment’s panic of waking up in an unfamiliar place, followed by the sudden recap of the previous day’s events.

“C’mon, we have to line up,” Skye told her as the other women in the bunk stood at attention in front of each of their beds.

Jemma rolled silently from her bed, haphazardly tossed her sheets into a slightly more presentable state, and took up her position next to Skye, staring blankly at a spot on the wall across from them.

Minutes later, two guards passed through. One counted them off and the pair moved on without anymore incident. Both Skye and Jemma relaxed, but they noticed that the other three women were remaining in place, so they exchanged a look, but did the same.

Two more minutes later, another pair of guards passed through, repeating the routine of the first. When they were gone, then the rest of the women relaxed and returned to their beds, chatting idly, retrieving the items they had just stashed away, and all around ignoring the two newest members to their bunk.

Jemma sat back down on her bed, and instead of climbing back up the ladder to hers, Skye took a seat next to her, the scientist scooching over a bit to provide her more room.

“We should probably split up,” Jemma stated slowly, her voice low enough so that the other women wouldn’t have been able to have heard what she said, even if they had been listening. Skye was a bit surprised by Jemma putting the idea forth, but wasn’t opposed to it as she nodded her head once, “Yeah, we’ll cover more ground that way. When we get to the cafeteria, we’ll scope the place out and see if we can find a group that Black Mamba and Whiplash would fit in to.”

“Then we’ll be herded back here after rec and we can swap notes,” Jemma added and Skye nodded again. Neither one of them was ultimately that comfortable with leaving the other on their own, but they couldn’t stay joined at the hip for their entire stay, not if they expected to really get anything done. They did have a mission. They needed to survive, they needed to stay out of trouble and keep their covers intact, but they needed to find out whatever they could as well. As uncomfortable as they both were with the idea of splitting up, they were even less comfortable with the idea of returning to the team completely empty handed.

“You remember our safe word, right?” Skye asked after a moment, a smirk tugging at her lips.

The other girl arched a brow at her, thinking for a moment, and then, haltingly, “Man...scaping?”

Skye’s smirk became a grin and Jemma rolled her eyes, but her own expression lightened significantly as well.

“After this is done we need to figure out a new one,” Jemma stated and the hacker shrugged indifferently.

About ten minutes later the male and female inmates of cell blocks A, B, C, and D were herded in groups of ten to the showers--which was probably one of the most degrading and embarrassing experiences for Jemma or Skye--and then afterwards were herded into the cafeteria, where they lined up to be served a spoonful of gunk that was barely fit to serve to dogs. Jemma was ahead of Skye, and with one last glance, they parted ways as the scientist dove head first into the maze of tables and bodies to find somewhere that Leeann Foreman would fit in. Skye silently wished the other girl luck, then turned her attention to her own tray as a splatter of unidentified grey matter was heaped onto it. She contained her expression of disgust to a simple crinkle of her nose as she turned around and followed the other agent’s example and began to head for a table she had targeted already. Feet away from her goal, she was intercepted by a guard. The same guard from the day before, actually. Skye wracked her brain to remember the name he had been called...Kurt.

She glared up at him as he sneered down at her.

“Oh, damn. Looks like this inmate made a mess,” The words came out in a condescending lilt that made Skye grit her teeth.

“What mess--”

On cue, the guard slapped Skye’s tray down, causing the breakfast slop to splatter on the floor at her feet.

“Now why’d ya have to go and do that? Now I have to write you up, inmate.”

Skye stared down at the tray, her hands held out, only inches spread from where they had been moments ago holding the tray, her mouth agape in surprise.

“What the he--”

“Come on, inmate, step outside before you cause a scene.”

He put a hand on Skye’s shoulder and turned her towards the exit. She shook his hand off and led the way herself, still trying to wrap her head around the annoying pointlessness of this whole thing. What the hell?

Nearby, Jemma craned her neck to watch, concern flashing through her eyes as Skye was led away, her knuckles white as she gripped the plastic spoon she’d been provided in partnership to the pathetic excuse for a meal they were being served. She wanted to help Skye, but she knew in the end that anything she did wouldn’t do anything but hinder both of them, so she resorted herself to slumping in her seat and turning her attention back to the other inmates sitting around her.

“Who is that guard?” The scientist asked no one in particular. The other members of the table exchanged looks, and it seemed like no one would answer until finally, “That’s Kurt Miller. One of the worst guys in this place--guard or inmate. He abuses his power to get whatever he wants and, by the looks of it,” There was a pause as the other inmate glanced over their shoulder back at Skye and the guard escorting her out of the cafeteria, “He’s found something he wants.”

Outside of the cafeteria, Skye shook off the hand that had once again placed off her shoulder.

“Okay! What do you want?” She demanded, whirling around to face the guard the moment they had passed the threshold between the cafeteria and the corridor beyond.

She’s barely gotten the words out before the man grabbed the metal collar around her throat, his fingers worming their way between the steel slightly heated from resting against her for so long and the skin of her throat. His grip tightened around it and he forced her backwards, causing her to stumble and her arms to flail as she quickly backtracked her steps to keep from falling over.

Her back slammed into a wall, and his fingers moved from the collar to snake around her throat, tightening enough only to be a threat and not to cause injury or mark.

“I want you to be quiet,” He hissed, leaning close.

Skye lifted her hand and slapped her hand against his face to push him away. He grunted when her hand made contact, but lifted his other hand to grab her wrist and slam her hand against the wall next to her head, a snarl now painting across his face, though his eyes were alight with amusement.

“You’re all so…fiery. Why?” He demanded rhetorically, his voice pitching up in a way that Skye would only ever be able to describe as psychotic.

“You’ve been beaten. You’re in here, what do you expect to happen? To be released on good behavior?”

Skye lifted her free hand, but his grip tightened around her throat now, making her forego that particular plan of attack for the moment.

“You’re a freak. The world doesn’t want you out there, and the world’s better off without you, I can promise you that. So why don’t you just relax and lie in the bed you made for yourself?”

His fingers moved back to the collar and he made to pull her away from the wall, probably to take her somewhere more secluded than a perfectly open corridor right outside the cafeteria, but Skye had absolutely no intention of finding out where that destination was.

The moment his grip moved away from her throat, she swung her free hand up to strike him in the nose. His head jerked back, but she didn’t give him any more time to react than that as her knee connected with his groin harshly, forcing him to his knees as he released the grip he’d had on the collar.

The hacker turned to run back into the cafeteria, but just as she did another guard emerged. Jemma’s guard from the day before, actually.

Skye caught herself from running into him, eyes wide, red marks on her neck beginning to form from where the scumbag had tightened his fingers around her. Jemma’s guard looked from Skye to his comrade, kneeling on the floor a few yards away, a hand trying to contain the blood now gushing from his nose.

He seemed torn for a second, and then stated in an exaggeratedly authoritative voice, “Attacking a guard, that’s grounds for solitary, inmate!”

“You’ve got be to kidding!” Skye complained as he grabbed her wrists and slapped a pair of handcuffs on them.

“Disobeying regulations is not a kidding matter, inmate,” The guard stated as he led her further down the hall and away from the injured man.

Skye just silently seethed as she was led through the facility. As they stepped down a staircase that led below ground, and after a lengthy silence had passed between them, the guard’s grip on Skye’s wrists loosened a bit as he stated, “Normally, I’d say you’d be safer in solitary than out there,” He led her down a dimly lit, smaller corridor than the ones above ground level. There were rows of locked, metal doors, with only a small hatch at the bottom of each that used deadbolts to remain closed and locked from the outside as well.

The guard led Skye to one of these doors and opened it, removing her handcuffs before he ushered her inside, “But in your case, you probably would’ve been better off letting Miller do whatever he wanted to you.”

The door slammed shut behind Skye, leaving her in darkness with those words echoing around her head.


	6. Chapter 6

Time had absolutely no meaning in a tiny, black hole it turns out. Shortly after being put in solitary, Skye thought she had kept a decent grasp on how much time had passed, but it wasn’t long before she realized she really had no idea.

The room she was in felt like a square box, but she wasn’t sure how big. All she knew was that she couldn’t lie down straight across any of the walls, but she could lie down, with her legs bent, diagonally and the room was taller than she could reach. There was absolutely nothing in the room, from what she could tell. There wasn’t even a light. She briefly wondered what she would be expected to do if she had to go to the bathroom, but decided not to think about that for too long. She had a bladder made of steel, from much practice living on the streets. Turned out a skill like that would pay off some day, go figure.

“Well, this is just great,” She muttered, listening to her voice echo off the walls. How was she supposed to find out anything locked in solitary? And what had that guard meant with that weird, creepy, foreboding statement?

‘In your case…’

What the hell did that mean? In your case?

In whose case? Did he know she was really an undercover agent? Or was he talking about something else?

She wracked her mind for an answer and then it hit her like a truck. Her hand lifted and her fingers touched the metal around her neck. She wasn’t Skye right then. How would he have known she was Skye, an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.? No, he still thought she was Tanya. And what was so interesting about Tanya Sealy? She had weird powers…apparently.

Skye sat bolt upright suddenly. So it was true. They were doing…something with the inmates in this place.

So where did that leave her?

“Crap!” Skye’s mind began running at a thousand words per second, trying to figure out what to do. Should she trigger Fitz’s panic button? She couldn’t let them experiment on her! She worried her lip gently. But what if they weren’t doing any experiments and the guy was just being a creep?

She sighed and relaxed against the wall behind her, pulling her knees up to her chest. No. She needed to wait and find out what, exactly was going on. If they didn’t come out of this thing with any sort of proof, it would’ve all been for nothing, and she would never forgive herself for being the reason behind her and Jemma being extracted prematurely.

So with a sigh of resignation, she leaned her head back against the cool wall behind her and started to count backwards from ten thousand.

Skye had always wondered, none too seriously, how horrible actual solitary confinement was, never having been subjected to it before in her life. How bad could it have been, after all? It was just being locked in a room for some indeterminate amount of time, right? That didn’t sound so bad.

Yeah.

It didn’t sound so bad.

Every once and a while, the hacker would barely hear the sound of footsteps just beyond her door, but only just, and those instances, so few and far between, were her only real reminder that there was anything on the other side of that metal door--even though she knew, rationally, that the world couldn’t have just disappeared while she had been in there. It was just so strange, how far her mind ran away on its own when most of her senses were all but cut off.

Suddenly, the latch at the bottom of her door opened with a bang that made her jump. A stream of light filtered into the room from the opening, which was bright enough to cause Skye to squint for a moment, but it was dim enough that her eyes adjusted quickly.

A tray with food on it was shoved through the opening, along with a gruff voice she didn’t recognize stating, “You have seven minutes to eat.”

She slid herself, without much haste, over to the tray. The guard left the hatch open so that she could see the tray, and what she was doing, and Skye eyed the food she found in the dim stream of light warily. It didn’t look much better than what they had been served for breakfast...the breakfast she never had a chance to try. Her stomach rumbled deeply as it was reminded that she hadn’t eaten all day, and hadn’t eaten much the day before due to nerves, actually.

She picked up the spoon on the tray and dug hesitantly into the food, which she couldn’t have placed in any of the major food groups if anyone had asked. She swallowed her distaste at the look and smell of the stuff and shoveled a spoonful into her mouth. After a few moments of experimental chewing, she found the stuff really wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Of course, it wasn’t good by any means, but it wasn’t the worst thing she had ever had in her life.

As she ate, she pondered over the time she had spent in the tiny, dark room. If this was dinner, then she’d been in there for almost ten hours. She wondered how much had happened in that time, if anything. She wondered what progress Jemma had made. She hoped the other girl was alright. There had been a moment, when Skye was being escorted by that creep out of the cafeteria, where she had glanced over at the scientist to find that the other girl looked about ready to charge across the room to Skye’s rescue. Obviously, Jemma hadn’t done that because she was far smarter than to do something so brash, but she hoped Jemma was okay.

While they had both realized earlier that day that they would need to split up, it had never occurred to them that they would actually be separated, not like they were now. But, Skye had the utmost faith in the other girl. Jemma had been nothing but perfect on her end of things thus far, and Skye had no reason to think that would have changed.

As per schedule, the guard returned in seven minutes to retrieve the tray and shut the hatch at the bottom of the door, once again leaving Skye alone to her thoughts.

She didn't have as long of a time to wait before she received another visitor. Maybe an hour later--she guesstimated but in actuality she had no idea how much time had passed, though in comparison to her first bout of solitude, it seemed significantly shorter--the door opened, blinding Skye briefly with the light from the hallway that was suddenly permitted entrance into the room.

The undercover agent only had moments to process that anything was happening before her arm was grabbed and a needle was propped at the ready against her skin. She yanked her arm back, opening her mouth to shout but a guard--she could see now that there were two, and another man dressed in a different uniform she didn't recognize--struck her, dazing her and ensuring her compliance as the second guard pressed the point of the needle into her flesh, injecting her with some in identified substance.

"What...what the hell was that?" She demanded, though the words lost the force she had intended to deliver them with when a wave of dizziness from the blow the guard had struck crashed over her.

"Vitamins," Was the vague response she received from the man in the unusual uniform. With that, as quickly as they had barged in, the trio of men left, slamming the door behind them and making Skye's head throb painfully from the noise.

The hacker groaned as she forced herself to sit upright against one of the walls, holding her knees to her chest and letting her head hang forward against them, completely ignorant as to what had just been injected into her system but not stupid enough to think it could be anything good.


	7. Chapter 7

“What do you mean?”

It had been a long day, which was only made longer by Skye’s disappearance. To say she was worried about the other girl was an understatement. The only thing that kept Jemma from really panicking was knowing that if Skye got into too much trouble, she would be able to trigger the panic on the collar Fitz had given her. Or if she got into too much trouble and Fitz or someone else monitoring the security spotted it, they’d interject. Agent May and Trip had yet to bust down the doors, so Jemma reasoned with herself that their absence must mean Skye was okay. At least she really hoped so.

However, Skye’s unexplained absence lit a fire inside Jemma, and when Skye didn’t return after being escorted out of the cafeteria, Jemma went into a frenzy of investigation. She needed to find out what could have happened to Skye. The mission itself would have been immediately put on the backburner if the two weren’t directly correlated.

Surprisingly, Jemma didn’t have as much difficulty with the investigation as she initially thought she might. Actually, she wasn’t having as much trouble with a lot of things as she had previously feared. She had initially thought that she would just screw things up left and right--after all, she wasn’t a field agent, and there was a perfectly good reason for that--but after her cram-session with May, she did feel a bit more confident going in. And actually getting there...it was much different than she had thought it would be.

The entire undercover portion was really the easiest thing about the whole mission, whereas initially she had thought it would be the most difficult task. After all, the last time she had been undercover, on the train job where Coulson had been her father, things hadn’t gone too swimmingly in that department, but that almost better prepared her for this mission. She knew what was more appropriate now, she thought back and reanalyzed what she had done wrong--as cringeworthy as it all was--and was able to correct her mistakes. Learning. She prided herself on learning, and if she didn’t use the experiences she had to further herself as an agent, then what was the point?

Now, in the prison, she almost had the sense that she had studied for a test all day and night, only to show up the next day and find out she knew far more than she needed.

Lying was still tricky for her, but Agent May had convinced her that this entire situation didn’t require her to lie. She was playing a part, and while she couldn’t tell the truth about who she was, she didn’t necessarily need to lie about it. She just needed to keep people from suspecting that she was anyone but Leeann Foreman, which was actually pretty easy because no one had any reason to suspect that she wasn’t Leeann Foreman.

The guards were jerks, and so were some of the other inmates--very much including that creepy fellow from the cell when they had first arrived--but they were just people, surprisingly enough. They had reputations, and some of them had truly done very despicable things and were quite atrocious in their personality when having to be dealt with, but many of them were rather average. Not everyone shared freely what they had done to get themselves locked up, and Jemma didn’t ask, and she wasn’t foolish enough to think that they hadn’t done anything wrong, but speaking with them, most of them really didn’t seem any different than anyone you would just happen to meet on the street or in line at the supermarket.

Of course, they weren’t ordinary, though. As Jemma found out, most of the men and women locked up in there were on a separate level than the average criminal, but many of them did have stories behind what they had done that were things people heard all the time. Maybe there was an above average amount of people who had committed the crimes they had just because, but Jemma heard familiar themes over and over again... family, friends, forced, coerced, no other choice…

Getting there, Jemma couldn’t help but think that this prison was the delinquent-equivalent to the S.H.I.E.L.D. training academy.

From the way Coulson had described it, Jemma had expected dozens of men and women on the same level as people like Johann Schmidt, Ivan Vanko, Loki, and dozens of other extra-terrestrial and superhuman beings... Arriving there, and learning more about her fellow inmates, Jemma found that there were actually very few people with outstanding abilities, like Tanya Sealy’s supposed powers. The majority of them were above average on the scale of intelligence and physical ability, and those that weren’t had come across bootlegged versions of the Extremis serum some way, or other such chemicals, that gave them temporary ‘superhuman’ abilities. Since being in prison however, those temporary abilities had almost entirely worn off, leaving behind only side-effects that made those that had injected the serums into themselves regretting that decision.

Really, Jemma was...well...disappointed. Maybe being a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative had dulled her senses to things like increased strength beyond the average human’s ability and genius level intellect, though the latter wasn’t all that unusual for her, but she had just expected more.

“What do you mean?” The bio-chemist repeated, her tone roughening in impatience as she waited for the portly man to elaborate upon what he had just said. He was speaking indirectly and in riddles that didn’t make any sense to Jemma. He wasn’t just messing with her, and to him this was all plain and speaking normally, but she was having a hard time being patient when he was the first person she had found who was even close to actually knowing anything and willing to speak to her about it, if only in riddles.

“Something unknown goes in and sometimes no one comes out,” He stated, like it was the simplest thing in the world, but it only deepened Jemma’s confusing as she pressed on, “Comes out? Comes out from where?”

“Dark, alone, the monsters come with claws filled of nectar,” Jemma’s brow furrowed slightly as he seemed to drift away even further as he trailed off, staring away from her as his eyes glazed over.

They were both silent as Jemma tried to figure out who she was go to next, but then suddenly the man locked back onto her and continued, “They say it will help. But it never does.”

Jemma tilted her head to the side, that was the clearest thing he had said this entire time, “Who? Who is ‘they’?”

“The monsters.”

Jemma felt her shoulders slump in defeat, but then he continued, “They dress in white and they’re always saying ‘sterile, we must remain sterile’,” The man frowned thoughtfully as he impersonated the voice of someone he was remembering.

“Doctors!” Jemma burst, her hope growing again, “Doctors…” She repeated as she tried to reevaluate everything else he had told her. If ‘doctors’ were ‘they’, and if ‘they’ were the ‘monsters’, ‘claws filled with nectar’...syringes.

“They’re injecting the inmates with something?” Jemma asked suddenly, not expecting to get a direct answer from him, but more so just thinking out loud to herself.

“Something unknown goes in and sometimes no one comes out…” The man repeated, mumbling the words almost angrily that he had to repeat them for her.

The scientist paused to think those words over before responding, “Are they...killing people?” She visibly blanched at the idea.

“One will analyze the train, try and make it run straight they say, but that track is crooked. It delivers the nectar to the monsters…” The man trailed off again, and then simply turned and walked away from Jemma before she could ask anything further.

She watched him go, her brow still furrowed thoughtfully as she processed those last words. Whatever ‘they’ were injecting the inmates with, someone was delivering it into the prison. But how was she supposed to figure out who it was?

Someone related to a train, whatever that meant, whether literally or metaphorically was anyone’s guess.

As the whistle blew the end of the inmates’ recreation time, Jemma wandered towards the exit that would lead out of the rec-room and back to the cells and bunks, her attention focused entirely on the small bit of information she had just gleamed.

So the rumor was right. At least one of them. They were doing something to the inmates. And wherever Skye was, Jemma didn’t doubt that whatever they were doing was being done to her.

“Please, be okay,” Jemma mumbled as she filed down the corridor, still grasping onto the barest comfort that Agent May and Trip hadn’t busted in, so that had to translate to Skye being okay. It needed to.


	8. Chapter 8

Once again, Skye wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she was let out from that tiny, dark box. If time didn’t have any meaning before, it was just an abstract concept of an idea to her since she had been injected with whatever they had given her.

She felt like she would be sick, th at she had a fever, that the world was spinning around her while she was standing still, and she felt odd in a way that she couldn’t even begin to describe, only as not right. Something was wrong. Whatever they had given her wasn’t responding to her system well, unless this was the effect it was supposed to be having, in which case it was doing perfectly.

When her door opened again, she was curled into a ball on her side, shaking from the chills running through her bones and making them quiver. She couldn’t have even told anyone if she had slept that entire time, or if she’d been given any meals, she genuinely had no idea. Everything after those guards and that man had left was a blur, and not just because nothing happened in that dark, solitary cell.

“C’mon, you’re being returned to your bunk in block C,” A guard grabbed her arm and forced her to her feet, as if everything were alright and that she was just the biggest inconvenience to him.

“Don’t…” She warned when he made to tug her out of the room.

“Come on,” He repeated angrily and made to grab her, but she pulled away again, stating, “If you want me to hurl all over your shoes, keep doing that.”

He fell quiet and waited until she was ready at that point. It only took a minute or two, but to Skye it felt like an eternity, like the nausea would never wear off. Finally, she offered him her arm, which he took tentatively, like he would accidentally induce her vomiting all over him. When she didn’t, his grip tightened and he led her down the corridor that she had traveled previously in order to get to the solitary cell.

The walk from the cell must have only taken five minutes, max, but to Skye it felt like it was taking forever. The walls swam and swirled before her eyes, so she tried to keep her gaze on the floor to keep from getting dizzy, but found the floor melting before her feet instead and resorted to not focusing on anything and allowing the guard to just lead her the entire way.

Suddenly, she was standing in the bunk that Jemma and Skye had been brought to when they had arrived. She didn’t remember the guard opening the door, or stepping inside for that matter, bu the next time she focused, there she was, with four other inmates staring at her. Well, three inmates and Jemma, who was the only one who seemed concerned as she lept from her bed and rushed over to Skye. The other three seemed more curious than anything else.

“S—” Jemma cut herself off from barely saying Skye’s name, and corrected herself quickly, “So…are you okay?” She eased Skye over to her own bed, realizing the other girl wasn’t in the best of shapes right in that moment.

Skye shook her head, “Not really, they stuck a needle in my arm, I don’t know what they did,” She muttered as she sat back onto Jemma’s bed, closing her eyes as a wave of nausea passed over her entire being.

Jemma crouched down in front of her, observing her carefully, reaching a hand up and pressing it to her forehead, concern written plainly across her face.

“You’re burning up…” She stated worriedly, frowning. Skye wasn’t necessarily burning up right then, she could have had the temperature for a while at that point, Jemma wouldn’t have known.

“How long was I gone?” Skye asked as Jemma checked her pulse, apparently capable of keeping track of the time without needing a watch.

“Your blood pressure is above average…” Jemma continued, not answering Skye’s question.

Skye watched as the other girl straightened up, fidgeting anxiously as she tried to figure out what to do. She couldn’t do much without having anything.

“You were gone all day and night,” Jemma finally answered, looking back at Skye, “How are you feeling?” She asked without waiting for Skye to respond to the time.

The hacker was actually a bit relieved by the timeframe. She hadn’t lost that much time, at least, even though it had felt like years being locked up down there.

“Like shit,” Skye muttered, and Jemma gave her a look, so she sighed and elaborated, “Nauseous. I was sweaty and clammy a little while ago I guess, which was pretty gross. I don’t know, it feels like I have a cold, but then there’s something else. I don’t know what. It’s not right though…”

“S—” Once again, Jemma had to cut herself off, and she cleared her throat quickly before correcting herself, “Sealy,” She warned, about to tell her that she couldn’t go off such a vague description, and Skye held her hands out beseechingly, “I don’t know, Leeann.”

And she didn’t, and it really freaked her out, and Jemma could see that fear in her eyes, and it made her bite her lip as she was hit with a punch of helplessness. She couldn’t do anything for Skye, not in the position she was in. She didn’t have any of her equipment, she couldn’t even access the most basic of tools or remedies.

“Maybe it’s just a cold. The guy said they gave me ‘vitamins’,” Skye offered, trying to ease the scientist’s mind when she could almost see Jemma beginning to mentally berate herself.

Jemma gave her a thoroughly doubtful look and Skye looked down at the floor. Yeah, she knew it probably wasn’t as simple as that.

“I spoke to one of the other inmates yesterday during recreation,” Jemma told her, sitting down on the bed next to her. Skye looked back up to listen as the newly made redhead continued, “He suggested that the inmates are being injected with something. It’s not good. He…hinted that it might be killing people.”

Skye’s heart dropped, but she kept her outward appearance relatively unresponsive as she looked down at her hands in her lap.

“Well, I’m not dead,” Skye offered, smiling weakly at Jemma, who didn’t seem comforted by that.

Jemma sighed and looked around the room, the other three women were engrossed in their own conversation, having perfectly forgotten about Skye. The scientist turned her attention back to the other agent, “Mansca—”

“No,” Skye grabbed Jemma’s wrist and shook her head, “Not yet. We’re not done. We haven’t found out anything. You have some hints from some other inmate, and I have a weird experience in a solitary cell, that’s not anything. We can’t give up.”

“We’re not giving up! We need to think about this more rationally and backtrack. They’ll understand!” Jemma pleaded.

“No,” Skye repeated.

“Yes,” Jemma responded. The hacker was surprised that Jemma didn’t back down so easily. Jemma didn’t necessarily conform to everything, but she usually avoided confrontation that was so direct as that.

“We can’t. I’m fine. It’s just a cold,” Skye assured her.

Jemma still didn’t seem convinced as she reached a hand up to Skye’s collar.

“Please. They might not be good people, but they shouldn’t be subjected to things like that,” Skye gave it one last shot, and Jemma’s hand hesitated in its search of Skye’s collar for that tiny hidden button that would trigger the panic and alert Agents Trip and May to extract them.

That argument did hit Jemma close to home. She couldn’t just give up on these people, not when she had found out that they were injecting these inmates with something, and could very well be doing much worse to them in addition.

After a few moments, Jemma finally sighed, “Alright,” and her hand dropped away from Skye’s collar. The hacker breathed a sigh of relief and leaned backwards until her back was lying horizontally across Jemma’s bed and her head was pushed up awkwardly against the wall next to it.

“So, what time is it?” Skye asked after a few moments of silence, interrupted periodically by the three women’s conversation from across the room.

Jemma thought for a moment, “We had breakfast about two hours ago. We should be moved to the cafeteria in about another hour.”

“Great. I could eat a horse right now,” Skye muttered sarcastically.

Jemma lay down next to her, though pushing herself a bit closer to the edge of the bed so that her head wasn’t pushed up awkwardly against the wall like Skye’s was. She looked up at the other girl as she spoke, “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

Skye turned her head to look at Jemma and shrugged, “I’ll be fine.”


	9. Chapter 9

The remaining hour before lunch passed without event, and lunch passed by without anything of significance happening as well. Skye and Jemma remained together, deciding they could retake up the investigation at dinner, if Skye was feeling up to it—Jemma was loathe to allow Skye to wander away on her own in the condition she was in.

After lunch, everyone was herded into the recreation room due to the supposed poor weather outside, but Jemma suspected the guards were simply too lazy to bring them outside. It didn’t really make much of a different to Skye or Jemma, but to the actual inmates…they needed to go outside. Humans weren’t made to be kept inside forever. Even normal prisoners received yard time.

But there was nothing Jemma or Skye could do about that fact, so instead they just meandered around the too-small recreation room with the other inmates who chatted with each other, got into arguments and small scuffles that were broken up by other inmates before the guards could intervene.

Skye was wary about the fact that the time was spent with the male inmates as well as female, but Jemma seemed less concerned.

“The women are actually just as dangerous as the men,” Jemma explained when Skye muttered her fears, “The women and men both look out for their own. It’s really strange, actually. They interact surprisingly civilly with each other. Well, I mean as civilly as inmates who haven’t experienced direct human contact in a long time could be expected to interact,” Jemma shrugged and Skye frowned thoughtfully as she looked around at the other inmates with a bit of new light shed on her thoughts.

Now that Jemma mentioned it, even though they were in the same room, the men and women still remained rather divided. Sure, some interacted with each other, but they appeared to choose to interact with each other. The ones that were interacting wanted the interaction. A man wasn’t forcing himself on a woman, or vice versa. It was almost like there was some unspoken agreement.

“So the inmates in here are more civilized than the guards. That’s…great,” Skye stated sarcastically, and Jemma gave her a questioning look, “I’ll tell you about it later.” Skye didn’t want Jemma freaking out if she told her about the lovely interaction she’d been allowed to experience with Kurt the guard the day before.

Jemma opened her mouth to press Skye for an answer, but was cut off as a loud, “Hey!” punctured the air. Both Jemma and Skye looked around to find the source, but there was no need as someone shoved Jemma roughly, causing her to stumble forward to keep her balance.

“Hey! What the hell was that!” Skye responded, quickly grabbing Jemma’s arm to help her keep and reacquire her balance. Jemma turned around to face her attacker. A woman about half a foot taller than Jemma stared down at the scientist, a fire of anger burning in her eyes.

“May I…help…you…” Jemma questioned haltingly, trying to keep her gaze from averting away. Leeann Foreman wouldn’t look away, that’s what Jemma kept telling herself at least.

“Yeah, you can tell me why you’ve been goin’ ‘round asking so many damn questions!” The woman shoved Jemma again, who stumbled back a step.

Skye opened her mouth to tell the woman to back off, but Jemma beat her to the punch, “Why do you think for a second that it’s any of your business?”

Skye’s mouth dropped as she turned to look at the scientist, whose voice had taken on a disturbingly dark tone, and looking at the other girl she could see that same darkness creeping through her eyes.

“It’s my fucking business because my friend got in trouble because of your fucking questions!” The woman seethed, stepping forward and shoving Skye out of the way to get right up in Jemma’s face, who didn’t back away.

Skye could only watch, mouth agape, eyes wide as this new Jemma remained resolute in her position, looking up at her attacker without flinching.

“Maybe you should tell your friend to be more careful,” Jemma shrugged, and Skye almost wanted to grab her and tell her to knock it off and stop egging the other woman on but…at the same time…she was really oddly fascinated by the entire situation. She had never seen Jemma like this. She doubted that anyone had ever seen Jemma like this.

“What the fuck did you—” The woman stopped herself from finishing the sentence and instead swung her arm, fist clenched, knuckles white.

Jemma ducked, barely dodging the blow, and Skye could see the flash of fear that entered her eyes when she straightened up again, it was the only sign that she was still Jemma and that this was just a part of her façade.

“Don’t fight back, fine, you’ll just make it easier for me!” The woman threw another blow, and once again Jemma barely dodged it. Now, Jemma made to move but then she stopped herself. She was hesitating. Skye could see that hesitation, that fear, and that panic, though she hid it very well in the hacker’s opinion. Jemma didn’t want to fight back, and she was frightened of the larger woman, but there was nowhere for her to run, and she couldn’t just dodge the other woman’s blows forever. She couldn’t remain that lucky forever.

Looking around, Skye expected someone to intervene, the guards, some inmates…anyone, but no one did. Apparently the same unspoken code that had the other inmates intervening with each other didn’t apply to newbies like Skye and Jemma. Fantastic.

“You like bitch, come here!” The woman shouted, throwing yet another punch at Jemma. This time, it hit its target, and Jemma’s head was whipped to the side as her ear rung from the blow.

Jemma’s head spun, and her eyes widened and she gasped softly as the pain zapped through her skull. May hadn’t warned her about how much getting punched in the head like that would hurt.

The woman went for another blow, and Jemma managed to dodge it again, barely regaining her senses in time to do. This time, she stepped to the side, and when the woman’s arm flew past her face, her arms came up, deflecting the woman’s hand away from her, but before the woman’s arm could bounce away, Jemma grabbed on, yanked the woman’s arm forward even further, using the inmate’s momentum against her a bit in order to help balance Jemma as the scientist her heel to sweep the woman’s ankle forward. The woman’s back collided with the floor before she could process what had just happened.

And before she could get up Jemma crouched down next to her and put a hand on the woman’s neck, above where her carotid artery was.

“Don’t get up,” Jemma stated simply. Of course, the woman didn’t listen and she made to swat Jemma away and get up, and in response Jemma used both hands to grip the woman’s pressure point.

The woman yelped softly as the simple touch caused a flare of pain, and she backed off instantly, falling still. In response, Jemma released her grip and sat back on her haunches.

“I’m sorry your friend got in trouble, but I needed answers,” With that, Jemma rose and returned to Skye, who was dumbfounded.

“What did you do?” Skye questioned when Jemma tugged her away from the scene, which had caused a small circle of people to form around the fallen inmate.

“Pressure point,” Jemma muttered simply.

“I thought that knocked a person out?”

“It can, but that requires longer, constant pressure,” Jemma shrugged.

“Where did you learn that?” Skye pressed when they were across the room and away from the gathering of people on the other side.

“I learned the dodging and knockdown from May,” Jemma responded.

Jemma finally turned to face her and Skye could see the fear now written plainly across her face, “I’m really glad that worked. I was afraid she would just keep fighting me off,” the scientist confessed. Talking in private...or as private as they could get, she spoke without the weird accent she had adopted while undercover, mostly because Skye couldn’t keep a fully straight face when Jemma talked in that weird Southern accent. The bio-chemist was also able to transition back into her alternate accent quite easily, so if anyone did wander over within earshot, she would simply switch back and nothing would appear out of the ordinary to their eavesdropper.

Skye grinned and took Jemma’s hand, “That was awesome,” She stated and Jemma rolled her eyes.

“Yes, it’s so great to be getting into fights and almost killed and—” A flash of pain through her skull caused her to stop, wincing slightly. Now, it was Skye’s turn to be concerned as she reached up to feel the side of Jemma’s head that had been struck tentatively, “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” The bio-chemist lowered her own hand, which had been reaching up to apply pressure to her aching head before Skye’s hand had rested against her skin.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” Before Skye could pester her more about it, Jemma changed the topic, “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty much the same. I’m just getting used to it,” Skye admitted, not pleased with the change of topic, but not avoiding it, and Jemma frowned in concern, “That’s not a good thing, Skye.”

“No names, remember?” Skye stated, but Jemma didn’t seem to care at that point.

Skye shrugged and looked down, her hand finally lowering from Jemma’s head, mumbling, “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Yes it is!” Now Jemma tightened her hand around Skye’s, causing the hacker to look back up at her.

“Being injected with unidentified substances is not something to take lightly!” Jemma practically hissed with pure worry.

Skye’s jaw tightened. She was worried, she really was, but she didn’t want to tell Jemma that. She wasn’t worried about herself; she wouldn’t allow herself to be worried about herself. Jemma was worrying about her enough for the both of them, and she was afraid that if she worried, it would just make Jemma worry even more.

“We  can’t do anything about it right now, anyway,” Skye reasoned, “So there’s no point worrying about it so much right now.”

Jemma was clearly going to argue more, but a voice called out, cutting her off, “Tanya Sealy!”

It took Skye a moment to register the fact that that was her name, and when she did she sighed unhappily, gave Jemma a slightly forlorn, defeated look, and then turned to walk away. Jemma’s grip on her hand tightened for a moment, like she could make her stay, but they both knew that Skye would get into more trouble if she didn’t respond. Jemma was just wary to let Skye go off on her own after the last time she had done that.

“Tanya Sealy!” The voice repeated.

“Yeah! What?” Skye replied, pushing her way through the inmates milling around the recreation room.

“You need to go see Doctor Wyndham.”

“Who the hell is Doctor Wyndham?” Skye breathed impatiently.

“The prison psychologist, come on,” The guard led her out of the recreation room, leaving Jemma alone, and venturing into the unknown yet again.


	10. Chapter 10

“Tanya Sealy, please sit down.”

The office was…really nice actually, for a prison that is. It was a pretty basic kind of office with a modern flare in the furniture that filled it up.

There were two leather chairs sitting across from each other on either side of a glass coffee table, and Skye hesitantly sat down in one of them.

“How are you enjoying your stay at our little Island?”

The man across the room, leaning against his desk, was…pretty average looking. Her wore a suit, though the jacket was slung over the chair behind his desk currently. His hair was stark white, trimmed cleanly and combed back, and he had a goatee framing his mouth that was equally well kept.

Skye looked at him like he had five heads when he asked that question, and at that silence response the man laughed.

“Yes, that’s about what I thought,” He pushed away from the desk and stepped over to her, offering her his hand in greeting, “My name is Doctor Wyndham. I’m the psychologist here on the Island. I try to keep the inmates in a mostly stable condition, and keep them from doing something they may regret.”

“Lovely,” Skye didn’t take his hand, and he slid it into his pocket, not offended by the gesture, “What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, every time an inmate is sent down to solitary, once they come back up I require that they have a session with me, just to make sure everything turns out normally.”

“Really? So I guess I wouldn’t be the first person to say I was injected with something against my will while I was down there?”

The Doctor’s brow furrowed as he frowned thoughtfully, concern flashing across his features, “Actually, yes. You would be.”

Skye wasn’t expecting that response, “Really?”

He sat down in the chair opposite her, leaning his elbows against his knees as he leaned forward, “Yes. I haven’t heard anything about that being done before, that is extremely unsettling news. Please, what do you mean you were injected with something?”

“I mean two guards and some guy in some weird uniform came into my cell, grabbed my arm, shoved a needle into it and injected me with something,” Skye stated bluntly, remaining skeptical that this guy was just messing with her and faking his ignorance.

He wrung his hands together as he looked down at the glass table between them, mulling over her words, and then he looked up and he looked…angry. Skye was surprised by the change, and it actually sent a spark of a fear through her.

“How do you feel?” He asked.

Skye shrugged, “Like I have a cold, I mean it’s not that bad…”

“No, it is. This is despicable news. I can’t believe a member of staff would have done that. I personally go through all of the files of the members on staff, and nothing has stuck out to me before. I can’t believe, if it’s happened before, that none of the inmates have mentioned anything about it to me before,” The doctor stood up and began pacing behind the chair he had been sitting in.

“I try to be their ally in here, Miss Sealy. They don’t have many, and these people need to have someone on their side,” Doctor Wyndham stopped pacing to grip the back of the chair he had been sitting in.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Well, it is a bit drafty in the bunk…”

He gave her a bemused look and she amended quickly, “I’m fine. It’s not that bad.”

“I can have the prison physician look at you and make sure everything checks out, but only with your consent.”

Skye shook her head, “No. I’ll have myself checked out later.”

He nodded slowly at her answer, mulling over everything.

“Okay, but please, if anything out of the ordinary, or if anything like that happens again, please, come to me immediately and I’ll have it handled. Did you get a good look at the three men who did this?”

Skye shook her head, “No. The cell was pitch black and the light was coming in from behind them.”

“Dammit,” The doctor gripped the seat until his knuckles turned white, and he hung his head as he stated, “I am so sorry this has happened. I know you’ve made mistakes, I know all of the inmates have made mistakes, but no one should be subjected to something like that. I assure you, an investigation will come from this revelation.”

Skye nodded her head slowly, “Okay…that’s…great…”

“Please, again, if you ever have any more issues, or if you just need to talk, my door is always open,” The doctor moved from behind the chair to offer her his hand, and this time Skye took it, albeit not entirely sure of the action.

“I am your only friend in here, Miss Sealy,” The man told her, “I’d really like if you came back tomorrow, just so I can make sure you are still okay?”

Skye thought for a moment, not sure she wanted to come back again, but decided she didn’t have anything else exactly planned, and he might be a good ally to have to find out more information about the prison, so she nodded.

“Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Great,” He smiled as she walked towards the door and opened it. A guard was waiting for her on the other side, who glanced at Doctor Wyndham questioningly. The psychologist nodded, and the guard escorted Skye down the corridor back towards the cell blocks.


	11. Chapter 11

“What happened?”

The question left Jemma’s mouth once Skye had barely taken a step back into the bunk after being escorted back from the prison psychologist’s, Doctor Wyndham’s, office. The other three women were idly listening from their separate beds. Without anything else to do, the two newbies were offering decent entertainment these early days of their incarceration.

“Nothing,” Skye answered. Jemma looked at her impatiently and Skye shrugged, “Really, nothing. He asked me how I was doing after being in solitary, apparently that a regulation he has in place here or something, that after an inmate gets out of solitary he needs to see them to make sure they’re still ‘all there’,” The hacker used her fingers to form air-quotes.

“Did you tell him what happened?” Jemma inquired slowly, and Skye nodded.

“Yeah, he seemed pretty angry about it, and it was news to him.”

“Really?” The skepticism in Jemma’s voice was hard to miss.

“Yeah, I don’t really believe that either, how could he not know?” Skye agreed, stepping over to Jemma who was sitting on her own bunk.

“That was it?”

“Pretty much. He wants to see me again tomorrow though to make sure I’m alright,” Skye finished with a nod, sitting down next to the scientist.

“I suppose that’s a good thing. Maybe he really doesn’t know, he could be a decent ally?” Jemma offered, and the hacker nodded again.

“I was thinking the same thing. Can’t hurt, right?”

Jemma nodded. Forte, from across the room, piped up when the two girls fells silent, “You went and saw the Doc?”

Skye turned her gaze over to the woman and nodded.

“Yeah, that guys kind of a creep. I try to steer clear of him.”

“Why?” Jemma asked for Skye.

“He’s just super friendly…like…too friendly, y’know?” Forte replied, propping her head up with her hand as she leaned her elbow against her pillow.

“He was really friendly,” Skye agreed, slowly turning her gaze back to Jemma.

“He’s almost like that giant purple dinosaur.”

Both Skye and Jemma frowned thoughtfully at that, not sure who she meant exactly until Jemma slowly offered, “Barney…?”

“Yeah! Him!”

Jemma looked at Skye for confirmation, and the hacker shrugged, “I guess. I don’t really remember Barney that well to know if they had similar personalities.”

“No, I mean, in creepy-factor. He creeps me out the same way that Barney creeps me out,” Forte clarified, and Skye considered that idea before agreeing, “Yeah, I can see that.”

“So he’s creepy?” Jemma asked for clarification. Both Skye and Forte across the room nodded.

“That’s the best way I would describe him, yeah,” Skye stated.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s bad,” Jemma added.

“No, you’re right, it doesn’t. He might just be an oblivious, unhelpful part of the faculty,” The hacker agreed as she turned so that she could lie across Jemma’s bed, leaning back against her pillow.

“You have a bed up there, you know,” Jemma informed her, jerking a thumb at the top bunk.

“I know, but I’m already here,” Skye grinned, “And it’s so far away, and then I’d have to climb up that ladder and you wouldn’t make a sick person do that, would you?”

Jemma had to admit, Skye did a wonderful impression of a begging puppy, and the bio-chemist rolled her eyes before shifting around so that she could lie down on the bed next to the hacker.

“If you two are going to do the do, can you at least wait until lights out?” Rawson questioned exasperatedly.

“We’re not having sex, relax!” Skye retorted.


	12. Chapter 12

“Here we are. Again,” Skye stated nervously from the same leather chair she had situated herself into the day before, clasping her hands together anxiously in her lap.

Doctor Wyndham was pouring himself a glass of water from the pitcher on his desk, and he laughed at the obvious discomfort in her voice. Not because he found her  discomfort amusing, per se, but he was simply amused that, in prison, she found being in that room uncomfortable. She wasn’t the only one like that, of course. The inmates got used to their routine within the prison, and that became comfortable to them, and then all of a sudden they were thrown into his office, which was the closest thing in that prison that resembled the outside world, and it was almost a shock for them.

“There’s no need for nerves here, Miss Sealy,” The man tried to reassure her, stepping over and taking a seat across from her once he had finished filling his glass, “You’re safe here.”

“I know,” The hacker nodded, “It’s just…”

“Odd?”

“Yes.”

He nodded his understanding as he leaned forward to rest his drink down on the glass table between them.

“It is odd, you’re perfectly entitled to feel that way and I don’t blame you for it at all,” He agreed and Skye nodded her head, unsure, as she muttered, “Cool…”

An awkward silence began to form between them that made Skye’s skin crawl. Thankfully, or not thankfully depending on whatever perspective it was looked at, the doctor broke the silence when he cleared his throat and proceeded to say, “I feel like we didn’t cover many bases yesterday. You took me a bit off guard with your revelation and I apologize for that.”

The young woman tilted her head in acknowledgement to the apology, but didn’t reply, so the man continued, “I wanted to have this follow-up session not just to make sure you’re okay physically, but I never got around to the actual point of the session that was to assess whether you were okay emotionally and mentally.”

Skye shrugged and remained silent, not entirely sure what she was supposed to say in response.

“Are you okay, since yesterday?”

The hacker considered the question for a moment, and then nodded, “Yes. I don’t really feel like I have a cold anymore.” She wasn’t lying, either. The cold-like symptoms she’d been suffering from had dissipated over night, but she still had that weird feeling inside of her that just made her feel off for a reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“That’s good, I’m very glad to hear that,” Doctor Wyndham paused to lift his glass and take a deep drink from it, spiraling them once again into a brief awkward pause in the conversation as Skye waited for him.

“So, how are you adjusting to life here on the Island, Miss Sealy?” Doctor Wyndham finally asked as he returned his glass to the tabletop.

“Fine…” Skye responded unsurely.

“Would you care to elaborate…?” He prodded gently. When she shrugged, he gave her a look and she sighed a bit impatiently, “I don’t really have anything to compare it too.”

He arched a brow as he stated, “I see, well that’s probably for the best then?”

“I guess.”

“What do you think led you here?”

Oh great, now they were really, actually going into a therapy session.

“A billionaire in a red and gold suit of armor?”

“Miss Sealy…”

“My horrible choices and mistakes that I only have myself to blame for. A broken home, friends who were a bad influence...what do you want me to say?”

Doctor Wyndham frowned thoughtfully and decided to change the topic before the girl became even more exasperated with the direction the current conversation was going, “How are you since solitary confinement?”

“Fine.”

“Are you sure? Have you found that you’ve been acting oddly at all?”

“Not really, no.”

“You found you were able to readjust back to being surrounded by others well?”

“I wasn’t in there that long. It was only a day.”

“A day alone can feel like an eternity, Miss Sealy.”

“Yeah, well, it was still only a day. And I’m fine. Really. Never better.”

“Nothing horrible, no nightmares?”

“Well, I do keep having this recurring one of this grey stuff that…oh wait, no, I’m just thinking of our breakfast.”

“Miss Sealy--”

“I’m fine,” Skye tapped her head softly with her knuckles, “Solid as a rock, I swear. Two plus two is four and all that.”

“Okay,” Doctor Wyndham held his hands up in surrender, “If you feel you are okay, then you are free to go. But if anything seems out of the ordinary, you’re always welcome to return.”

Skye rose from her chair and saluted half-heartedly, “Roger that, Doc.”

As she left, opening the door to be reclaimed by the guard waiting outside of it, Wyndham rose from his chair, taking his glass with him, and stepped over to the barred window on the far side of the his office. He stared out at the water that surrounded the prison, mulling over Tanya Sealy’s words silently.


	13. Chapter 13

“It feels like we’ve been in here for forever,” Skye muttered, hunched over her bowl of grey matter that was supposed to serve as breakfast the morning following her second meeting with Doctor Wyndham.

The day before had passed uneventfully. Skye and Jemma had poked around a bit more, but they weren’t getting anywhere fast. Most of the prisoners who came back from solitary in the time since the girls had arrived weren’t willing to share whatever they had experienced in solitary, and the ones who did share didn’t have anything out of the ordinary to reveal.

From Skye’s experiences the first day, they knew that there was corruption in the prison’s faculty, and what had happened to the hacker while she was in solitary alluded to the idea that there was experimentation going on in the prison using the inmates as test subjects, but they didn’t have any proof.

They couldn’t even prove that Skye had been injected with anything, not while they were in there. And even once they got out, who was to say whatever had been in Skye’s system wouldn’t have fully passed through by the time they regrouped with the rest of the team?

That nagging, weird feeling Skye had after being injected with the unknown substance was still flowing through her, but she was becoming dulled towards it, and it was clear that whatever it had been wasn’t going to kill her, so both girls’ panic towards it had died down a bit, though Jemma was still concerned over the entire idea that Skye was injected with they didn’t even know what.

The rest of the team would no doubt believe Skye and Jemma when they told everyone what had happened, but if they wanted to get anything done, and wanted to provided Coulson with the ammunition he needed to have action taken to reform the prison, then they needed more.

They needed a plan.

“Yes, it does, but we don’t have forever,” Jemma pointed out and Skye sighed as she rested her spoon in the bowl and leaned back, “Yeah, I know.”

“We need a plan,” The bio-chemist added, and Skye nodded.

“Yeah, we need to get access to more of the facility. To files, to a computer, to anything,” The hacker glanced around their immediate vicinity, but no one was listening to them.

“The guards are quite lax, but the prison runs quite a tight ship in its maneuvering inmates from location to location throughout the facility,” Jemma commented, “I was really expecting to have more...freedom...I know how ridiculous that sounds but…”

“No, you’re right. The way Coulson was describing it in the briefing I thought we would get here and the prisoners would have taken over, but the inmates aren’t the problem with this place. I think the inmates could force more freedom on the guards if they wanted but...I don’t think they want to, they don’t seem like they want to,” Skye once again glanced around, but to observe their fellow inmates and not to make sure anyone was listening to them.

“They seem content with their routine,” The other girl stated. Skye continued looking around, considering Jemma’s words. Now that the idea had been planted in her head, she realized Jemma was right. The other inmates were either content with the routine or they were...or they were afraid.

That made sense though, because not all of the inmates would have any idea of what was going on, and those inmates probably wouldn’t want to cause trouble and make their current plight any worse. The ones that did know what was going on wouldn’t want to stick out from the crowd and draw attention to themselves, and in addition make themselves a target.

It was an accurate analysis, but it didn’t really help the two undercover operatives at all.

“Which just makes our job harder,” Skye stated bluntly, turning back to face Jemma who nodded helplessly.

With most of the inmates just going with the flow, anyone who didn’t would stick out like a sore thumb.

After a few moments of silent brainstorming, Skye hesitatingly spoke, “I have an idea, but I know you’re not going to like it…”

Jemma kept her expression stoic as she waited for the hacker to continue, and Skye took a breath before she did, “We need a distraction so that at least one of us can peel off to snoop around. They already don’t like me, clearly, and they’d notice if I went missing pretty quickly, so I think I should do something to get thrown into solitary again.”

“You can’t--”

“No, just listen,” Skye held a hand up for Jemma to wait and let her finish, “I know what to expect now. I can try fighting them off, but even if I can’t we already know that whatever it is they’re injecting into inmates doesn’t kill me, so…” The hacker shrugged. It wasn’t a great plan, by any means, but it was better than nothing.

“I can cause a big enough ruckus to draw their attention to me, and that’ll give you the opportunity to sneak off. I think you’re best bet would to start at Doctor Wyndham’s office. Even if he doesn’t know anything, he has files on everyone, and maybe he missed something in them.”

“Skye…” Jemma’s voice was very low, barely audible, and Skye knew that the other girl still wasn’t convinced.

“We need to find something, Jemma. And if you don’t find anything, I can at least make sure to get a better look at the guys that come to inject me with whatever while I’m down in solitary.”

Jemma remained silent, looking down at her uneaten food in front of her. Skye’s plan wasn’t foolproof, and there were far too many dangerous, unpredictable variables for it to possibly be considered in any way safe, but she didn’t have a better plan in mind, that was the problem.

“On one condition,” Jemma finally spoke, meeting Skye’s gaze, “If anything goes wrong, you need to promise me that you will trigger the panic.”

“Alright,” The hacker agreed and pushed away from her seat. Jemma seemed surprised by the action, “Right now?” She asked.

“Yeah, no better time than the present, right?” Skye offered her a smile and then quickly walked away before Jemma, or her own nerves, could stop her.

 

Across the cafeteria, Kurt the guard was back on duty, though he seemed highly dispirited as he simply stood, glaring at the inmates, his face black, blue and swollen, an assortment of bandages over his nose that spoke volumes about the damage Skye had done there.

“Hey, Kurt my man!” Skye called and the man’s eyes flicked over to the approaching girl.

“What the hell do you want, inma--” He didn’t even get the question out before Skye grabbed him by the front of the uniform and yanked him forward as she simultaneously brought her head forward, colliding her forehead with his nose.

 

Back at the table, Jemma was aghast as she watched everything unfold. Skye had just headbutted the guard. Skye still hadn’t explained what had happened, so Jemma didn’t fully understand the history between the guard and the hacker, but clearly Skye had a very strong dislike for him as she ensured that if his nose hadn’t been broken before, it most certainly was now.

 

The other guards in the cafeteria rushed over to help the guard being attacked by the rogue inmate, and the first one to arrive at the scene grabbed Skye, but she pulled away and fought him off. The next two arrived and she kept fighting them off. Now, every guard in the cafeteria’s attention was turned towards the volatile inmate, and most of the other prisoner’s attention was turned to the scene of action as well. Jemma took that as her opportunity to make her move and rose from the table and slunk away, silently praying that Skye wouldn’t take it too far and get herself injured.

 

Another guard grabbed Skye’s wrist, and she twisted out of his hold before turning around and kicking out at him. When she turned, she saw out of the corner of her eye Jemma moving towards the exit of the cafeteria that had been left unmanned, and seeing that her frenzy came to its conclusion.

She was forced harshly to the ground, her arms twisted painfully behind her back and her wrists handcuffed together. The hacker was actually surprised at how long she had lasted. She wasn’t an inept fighter, and she had learned a lot as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in that department, but she she wasn’t May. It made her think that maybe the guards were far more incapable than they led the inmates to believe.

Yanking her to her feet, the guards immediately walked her out of the cafeteria.

“You need help with her, Jack?” One asked. Another, Jack, responded, “No. I’ll take her to solitary. You guys take Kurt to the infirmary.”

No one argued, and Skye was pushed down the corridor by the one guard. She craned her neck to see who was leading her from behind and was surprised to see Jemma’s guard from the first  day.

“So, back to solitary? Do I get my old room back?”

Jemma’s guard, Jack, glanced at her and shook his head slowly, “Not this time.”

Skye blinked, her attention going forward again for a moment before she asked, “You’re not taking me to solitary?”

“You’ll wish I had,” Was the only response she got and her eyes widened as the man, in fact, led her down an unfamiliar corridor. She strained her hands against the handcuffs, but it was no use, and with the guard holding her wrists down near her lower back, she couldn’t reach up to trigger the collar.


	14. Chapter 14

With a great deal of help from Skye before her departure, Fitz had been able to infiltrate the prison’s security system in order to monitor the camera feed and keep an eye on both girls while they were undercover. Over the course of the days they had been there, the team took shifts with their respective tasks. Coulson and Fitz remained on the Bus, monitoring Skye and Jemma, and Trip and May took shifts waiting for an alert that would signal they needed to extract the two girls.

There hadn’t been an opportunity for May or Trip to go undercover into the prison after the two girls. As much was wrong with the prison, their security against infiltration in such a manner as that was extremely tight, which probably had a great deal to do with the influence S.H.I.E.L.D. had on the prison at one point in the past. Getting in and out of the prison was extremely hard, and that wasn’t the problem with the facility as a whole. The problem was what went on during one’s stay within the walls.

The problem was the prison was, from the outside, any typical prison, and as secure as any high-security prison. So, that in mind, the question was how corruption was seeping into the prison’s ranks. Obviously, someone higher up on the food chain was pulling some strings, which didn’t bode well for anyone. It meant that someone high up on the food chain was most likely not only allowing the corruption, but condoning and enforcing it.

Skye and Jemma needed to not only find out who could possibly be that disruptor at the top of the chain--or  find someone who could lead them to that person--but they needed to prove that it was going on at all.

From their perspective of the security cameras, Coulson and Fitz had no way to tell what progress Skye and Jemma had made in that department. They could tell where the girls were, make sure they were okay, but there were many blind spots throughout the prison. Fitz had learned that first hand the day after Skye and Jemma had arrived at the prison.

Skye had been escorted out of the cafeteria after a guard had slapped her breakfast to the floor, and then attacked by the same guard once they were out of the cafeteria. Fitz had alerted Coulson immediately, but Skye had handled the guard before Coulson or Fitz had decided if they needed to take action to help or not. She had been caught by a second guard and escorted...somewhere else. The guard had led her down a corridor that didn’t have any cameras, and all Fitz could do was watch as they turned out of sight of the last camera.

“We need to go get them,” Fitz had turned in earnest to face Coulson, who was watching the screen intently.

“No,” The superior agent finally responded, and Fitz’s mouth dropped open, a flabbergasted expression distorting his features as his mind attempted to catch up and formulate the best argument, but Coulson stopped him before he could start by saying, “Skye knows what’s she’s doing. If she’s in trouble, she’ll trigger the panic.”

And with those words, Coulson left Fitz to his lone vigilance. So, Fitz turned his attention to Jemma’s progress and supervised his best friend as she appeared to almost interrogate her fellow inmates. It was strange seeing her so aggressively pursuing answers, but really it would have been odder to Fitz to see her sitting still somewhere twiddling her fingers.

Coulson had taken over monitor duty when Skye eventually returned, and he sat a bit closer to the screens, his brow furrowing as he studied the girl closely. Something wasn’t right. There was something wrong. She looked disoriented and dazed, but her wrists weren’t restrained. If the hacker was in serious trouble, she could have triggered her collar. With that reasoning fluttering about his head, Coulson’s worry took a backseat, though it still tried to drive from that location multiple times.

 

It was now the fourth day of Skye and Jemma’s mission, not including the night the girls had arrived at the prison. Fitz was back at the monitors, munching on a bowl of chips as he kept one eye on the monitors and his other eye on the gadget he was currently working on--a pocket-sized breathing apparatus for underwater.

The prison’s camera feed was displayed in full on the large monitor in front of him, the many cameras divided into small screens lined up across the entire monitor. They chose this setup so Fitz or Coulson wouldn’t miss anything by the monitor going through a cycle of the camera feed, instead just displaying all of the cameras at the same time.

The scientist cursed under his breath as the screwdriver head slipped off the screw for the umpteenth time and he leaned back in his chair, setting the tool down on the desk. It was hard for him to focus on his own work when he was so busy worrying about his best friend, and Skye of course. The breathing apparatus was the only thing he could concentrate on for lengths of time, and even then he couldn’t concentrate on it for very long. He was determined to finish it--after all its purpose hit a bit close to home--but the memories working on it swept up inside of his head forced him to need to take a break more often than usual.

His eyes lifted to the monitor as he reached for a couple of chips, and a flurry of movement on a handful of the small screens brought his full attention to that section. They were all shots of the cafeteria. He had monitored the inmates’--including Jemma and Skye’s--movement from their cells and bunks to the cafeteria only about twenty minutes ago, and everything had seemed quite normal and uneventful. At least until now. His brow furrowed as he sat on the edge of his seat, leaning onto the desk to get a better look at the screen and the action going on there. The screen was small enough as it was, and all of the cameras in the cafeteria offered wide shots of the entire room, so everything was even smaller and more difficult to discern.

His eyes widened when he did, finally, interpret what was going on.

Skye was surrounded by all of the guards that had been in the cafeteria and she looked to be fighting them all off.

“What the…” Fitz slammed his hand against the button that would trigger the radio, “Sir! You should come see this, quick!”

Within the minute Coulson came rushing from his office over to the area of the bus they had transformed into the surveillance center for this mission, “What is it, Fitz?”

The scientist pointed at the screen and Coulson leaned over his shoulder to get a better look.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know! One second everything was normal, and then I look up again and Skye’s at war with an entire squad of guards!” As Fitz spoke, Skye was forced to the ground, having apparently surrendered by the looks of it. Coulson’s eyes scanned the screen, and then the others in that grouping. Suddenly, he lifted a hand a pointed at one of the other screens, “There.”

Fitz directed his attention to the screen and just managed to catch Jemma slinking her way out through an unattended exit of the cafeteria while everyone’s eyes had been turned to the scene involving Skye.

“They’re making a move…” Fitz breathed and Coulson nodded, leaning away from Fitz’s shoulder to broaden his view of the monitor as a whole and find the next screen that Jemma would appear on.

“Use Skye’s code to give Jemma cover,” Coulson commanded, and Fitz punched in a few series of keys. A moment later, the number of screens doubled as they took control of the prison’s security camera feed to provide the security guards of the prison with the same few seconds looping on all of the cameras. Now Fitz and Coulson could see what was really happening, and could see what was transmitting to the security guards. The cafeteria feed remained live for the security guards, but everything else was looped.

“So they’re okay,” The scientist added, looking up at his superior. Coulson didn’t respond as he spotted Jemma on one of the other screens, making decent progress away from the cafeteria, and then began scanning the monitor for the next screen Skye would appear on once she had been escorted from the cafeteria.

“Not necessarily, look,” Coulson pointed to one of the screens and Fitz looked back at the monitor. Skye and the rest of the guards had just left the cafeteria. Her hands were bound behind her back, with a guard directly behind her holding them there. The guards seemed to discuss something, and then all of them left back into the cafeteria except the one holding Skye’s bound wrists.

“Something’s not right…” Coulson stated as Skye was led away from the cafeteria. Both Coulson and Fitz expected them to turn down the corridor that would lead Skye to wherever she had been brought before, but they didn’t. They turned down a completely different corridor that kept them within sight of the cameras.

Minutes passed and Coulson requested Fitz keep an eye on Jemma while he kept an eye on Skye.

The cafeteria was right in the heart of the facility, so Coulson couldn’t even predict where the guard was bringing her, he only knew that the guard wasn’t bringing her to the same place she had been brought previously.

“Where’s Jemma now?” Coulson asked, not taking his eyes from Skye and her guard, not wanting to lose track of them for a moment.

“She just made it into that office that Skye was in yesterday and the day before,” Fitz responded. There wasn’t a camera in the office, so Fitz had no idea what Jemma could have been doing in there, but he didn’t worry about that so much, trusting that she knew what she was doing, and instead kept an eye on the other screens that showed him different views of the corridor outside of the office, watching for anyone that might smell trouble for his best friend.

A few minutes passed, and Fitz perked up when Jemma poked her head out of the office. The corridor was clear, and she slid out through the door and continued down the corridor--continuing away from the cafeteria.

“She has a file,” Fitz declared, and indeed the bio-chemist had a folder in her hand.

“Where is she going now?”

“I don’t know…” The engineer’s voice trailed off as he continued to watch his friend as she turned down corridor after corridor, being as stealthy about her exploration as an inexperienced bio-chemist possibly could be.

“The warden’s office,” Fitz answered suddenly when Jemma turned down another corridor. That had to be where she was going, there was nowhere else for her to go.

“Where are they bringing Skye?”

“I’m not sure yet...” Coulson’s expression was solemn when he responded.

A few more moments passed as the girls each made their own progress through the facility. Finally, Fitz broke the silence by declaring, “She’s in. I don’t know where the warden is, but he’s not in his office…”

“They hit a blind spot,” Coulson stated when Skye and her guard turned down another corridor that didn’t come up on their monitor. He scanned all of the screens to figure out where they could pop up next--all of the routes from the corridor they were currently in were monitored--but they never came back up on the monitors.

“They went into one of the rooms in that corridor. Fitz, bring up the blueprint, we need to know what’s down there,” Coulson turned to the scientist, who furiously began typing away. He wasn’t as capable as Skye with a computer, but he was far from being inept at maneuvering through the system to bring up the blueprints.

“The armory, a few unmarked rooms, and the infirmary,” Fitz stated, observing the layout of the prison.

“The infirmary. That’s where they’re bringing her,” Coulson’s expression was solemn as he turned away from the monitors.

Fitz turned to look at the older man, a confused expression crossing his features, “Why would they be bringing her there?”

Coulson’s experience told him that Skye was being brought to the infirmary and for a handful of reasons. None of which were pleasant.

“I’m going to contact Trip and May and send them in. Keep an eye on Jemma. If Skye comes up again, let me know,” Coulson didn’t answer Fitz’s question before he walked away and Fitz turned back to the monitor.

 

“Where are you taking me?” Skye asked, impatiently tugging her arms against the guard’s grip. He didn’t respond. They walked about halfway down the corridor they were currently traversing when he stopped suddenly, yanking Skye to a halt as well by her wrists. She turned and looked to see why he had stopped and found that they were standing outside of a door. The little sign next to it told her it was the infirmary, and her brow furrowed as she looked at the guard, “Why are you bringing me to the infirmary?”

Unsurprisingly, she still received no answer as he ushered her through the door and into the room, which was already occupied by three other. She recognized the uniform on one of them as the same uniform that guy from her time in solitary had been wearing. One of the others was the warden--which she only knew from when she had been doing her brief research of the prison--and the last person was another guard, who stood a bit off to the side against the wall. The room itself didn’t look much like the typical infirmary. There was an examination table in the center of the room and there was medical equipment on display covering the entire place, but the chair bolted to the floor next to the examination table threw everything off.

“Why am I here?” Skye demanded as Jack the guard brought her to the center of the room, where a chair was bolted to the floor.

“Miss Sealy!”  The warden declared happily. He was a pudgy older fellow with a balding head and watery eyes. He didn’t look anything like the militaristic wardens you usually saw on t.v. or in the movies.

“Yeah, what?” Skye responded testily as she was forced to sit in the chair and the guard that had been standing to the side stepped over to assist. As Jack the guard uncuffed her hands, the second one grabbed her wrists and held her arms against the armrests of the chair so that Jack could secure her to the chair by her wrists. Once her wrists were immobile, he moved to her ankles. Skye kicked out, hitting him square in the chin, and the second guard punched her, making her gasp as her head swam. Dazed as she was, Jack the guard received no further trouble as he used the shackles that were built into the foot of the chair to restrain Skye’s ankles.

“Fredrich, there’s no need for that,” The warden commented, stepping over.

The second guard didn’t look in the least bit apologetic as he stated, “Sorry, sir,” and both he and Jack stepped off to the side as the warden stopped in front of Skye. The man in the strange uniform was moving around behind Skye and she couldn’t tell what he was doing.

“Now, Nelson, tell me what happened, exactly,” The warden requested, his eyes never leaving Skye.

Jack spoke up from Skye’s left, “She went berserk in the cafeteria.”

“Well, yes. I know that, that’s why I’m here. That’s why I told you to bring her here if anything out of the ordinary happened. Could you tell me what you think might have caused it?”

“I’m not sure, sir. It was so sudden. She just walked right up to Miller and struck him.”

The warden nodded, his stare making Skye’s skin crawl as he stated, “That just won’t do. I assume it’s a side effect, Doctor?” His gaze finally lifted from Skye to the man rummaging around behind her.

“It could be. We’ve run into this sort of side effect in the past, and it’s never boded well for the subject in the past.”

The warden gave an exaggeratingly sorrowful sigh as he nodded and looked back down at Skye, “No, it never has. They start getting brash and aggressive, and before you know it they’re tearing other inmates apart, limb by limb. We can’t go through that again, the investigation was almost enough to shut us down entirely.”

Skye’s eyes widened a bit as she listened to the man. Okay. So they were experimenting, and they had injected her with something that was definitely not good, but she hadn’t been acting out because of the serum...but they didn’t know that, and she couldn’t tell them and just throw Jemma under the bus like that.

“But…”

Oh great, there was a ‘but’. Skye’s hands gripped tightly to the armrests of the chair as the man leaned in close enough to her that she could smell the stench of his breath--a mixture of whiskey and pickles.

“You’re a very unusual case, Miss Sealy,” He paused to look her up and down and then offered her a smile that quite possibly could have been the visual equivalent to nails on a chalkboard before he continued, “We were going to have to do something with you anyway. Ask me why.”

The hacker remained silent in her seat as he straightened up and began pacing in front of her. He gave her adequate time to humor him, but when it was clear she wouldn’t, he shrugged and continued anyway, “I’ll tell you why. You’re not who you say you are, Miss Sealy.”

Skye blanched. She couldn’t help it. How did he know that? He glanced over at her and guffawed, a large grin splitting his face.

“Oh, you weren’t expecting that were you? Well, I wasn’t expecting the news that someone had snuck in. It was even more surprising to learn that someone had snuck in as a prisoner. Who would do that?” He looked around the room at the two guards, but the question was rhetoric they knew, so they remained dutifully silent. The warden turned back to Skye as he went on, “So I was going to need to bring you in here eventually anyway. I was just hoping you would give me an excuse, and low and behold, you did!”

The hacker wasn’t listening. How did he know? How did they find out? Sure, both she and Jemma weren’t perfection when it came to this whole undercover thing, but she hadn’t thought they had triggered any red flags, so what had happened?

The warden was snapping his fingers in front of Skye’s face annoyingly, pulling her from her panicked thoughts as she glared up at him. He had asked her something, and her silence had clearly rubbed him the wrong way because suddenly he looked pissed.

“Miss Sealy, or whatever your name is, why don’t you just make this easier for us all and tell us where you came from?”

She continued remaining silent, and apparently he didn’t like that very much because he lifted his hand and backhanded her across the face, knocking her head to the side and causing a flash behind her eyes simply from the pain.

He grabbed her jaw tightly and forced her to look at him as he hissed, “You’re going to die, either way. I can have it done quickly, which will be much less painful for you, or you can make this harder and I can send you through an entire world of pain before we end your pitifully short life.”

Skye shook her head free of his grasp and responded, with far more confidence than expected in her current situation, “Try asking me nicely and maybe I’ll give you a hint.”

She was expecting him to strike her again, but instead that creepy smile returned as he stepped backwards away from her.

“Fine,” The warden turned and stepped towards the door that Skye had entered through, “Doctor, handle her. Drag it out, please.”

“You don’t want to know who she is or where she came from?”

The warden paused at the door, looked over his shoulder and responded, “No. It doesn’t matter. What could she have learned and sent back to them, if anything even? Fredrich,” The warden turned his head to look at the two guards who had remained obediently stationary this entire time, “When the doctor is finished with his work. Deal with her. I’ll be in my office filling out the report. Nelson, you’re with me.”

The two guards nodded their assent and Jack the guard quickly walked over to join the warden as he left the infirmary.

The doctor stepped around the room until he was within Skye’s eyeline, and then he approached her. Now, in the better lighting, Skye got a closer look at his uniform. It was a weird hybrid of a doctor’s uniform, a military uniform, and a suit, and it was entirely black. There were three items of his outfit that weren’t black, and in contrast to the rest of his clothes they stuck out like beacons. There was a purple tie with black pinstripes hanging neatly from his neck, a golden yellow pin attached to the tie, and a pair of yellow rubber gloves on his hands, pulled up over his forearms and the sleeves of his jacket.

He was middle-aged, and had a weird, dark sort of rugged handsomeness about him...not that Skye was really into that, and she definitely wasn’t gauging his sex appeal while he was preparing to, literally, torture her to death, but she needed to remember him. She needed to remember what he looked like. Then again...’dark sort of ruggedly handsome’ wasn’t a superb description...

He had a syringe in one hand, which he was holding up and observing the contents of as he stepped closer to Skye.

“Now, Miss, I don’t know where you came from, and maybe the warden doesn’t care, but I’m afraid I’ve always been a curious mind, and seeing how he wishes me to drag this out anyway, I don’t see why I can’t kill two birds with one stone,” He brought the needle down to the inside of her elbow, and Skye tensed up as it penetrated her skin and he injected her with something new.

“What is that?” Skye asked warily. The doctor arched a brow at her, “I’d normally ask why you expect me to answer your questions when you won’t answer ours, but I do love talking about my work, so,” He removed the needle from her arm and stepped behind her again, “This is a serum I developed a few years ago to heighten one’s sense of touch. I find truth serums to be tiring, boring, and not very reliable, personally, so I prefer this method so much more.”

Skye wasn’t particularly sure what that had to do with anything, but okay.

Behind her, she heard a sound like a fridge opening and closing, and then the doctor returned in front of her, now holding a dull metal skewer.

“What’re you going to do, roast me?” Skye muttered as he stepped closer. He laughed, but shook his head, “Not at all. How are you feeling?”

The hacker stared at him and didn’t respond. However, internally, his question made her reassess herself, and she found that, slowly, her clothes were starting to feel extremely itchy, and the metal holding her wrists to the armrests of the chair and ankles to the base were beginning to ache and feel almost as though they were chafing, but when she looked down at her wrists they weren’t even red.

The doctor smiled as Skye looked down, clearly confused as new feelings began to penetrate her skin, not yet hurting her, but setting her nerves abuzz as they tried to keep up with what was going on.

“Good,” Was the only warning Skye received before he pressed the chilled metal of the skewer to her arm. She jerked, but her restraints held her in pain, as the cold touched her skin, and almost felt as though it were whitehot and burning her, but when the doctor pulled the skewer away, her arm was fine, maybe a bit pinkish, but that quickly faded.

Skye’s panic began to grow as he pressed the metal to her skin again, causing the burning sensation to ignite anew.

As Skye winced, but kept herself from making a sound, the doctor’s fascination and amusement grew.

“Now, you see how much that hurts? That’s just with a dull piece of metal that has only been chilled in the short time you’ve been in this room. Imagine what I could do with a scalpel, with a flame? Both of which I have readily available, mind you. So, let me repeat the warden’s question, where did you come from?”

Skye grit her teeth and bit her tongue, and this seemed to just amuse the man further as he smiled and practically pranced away out of her eyesight again, “Oh, good! I was really hoping you wouldn’t give up that easily, and you do not disappoint!”

The hacker heard the sound of a switch being flipped, the hiss of gas emitting from a pipe, and then the whoosh of a flame igniting. The man returned, the previously mentioned scalpel in his hand, and he crouched down in front of her.

“Now, for justification’s sake, I’ll ask again: where did you come from?”

 

Jemma flipped through the contents of the warden’s desk drawers quickly. Nothing. She frowned thoughtfully and straightened up, turning around in a circle to see the entire office. It was rather mundane of a space. A desk with a chair behind it, an armoire, and another chair on the other side of the desk were the only pieces of furniture, and the entire color scheme was a dreary grey.

It wasn’t a pleasant space, that was for sure, but she didn’t spend much of her time observing the decor as she moved from the desk to the armoire.

She needed to find something. The warden’s file had been one of the handful she had skimmed through in the psychologist’s office, and there were a number of red flags that stuck out to her in it, but she needed more. The file alone would be grasping at straws.

She opened the armoire doors to reveal nothing but a few jackets hung up there. Bending over she slid open the drawers and began rummaging through their contents.

“Come on,” She muttered as she moved to the next drawer, and then the next, and the next. She closed each one after she had finished scanning it for anything, and when she reached the last one she close it slowly, helplessness weighing heavily on her shoulders as she tried to figure out her next move.

As the drawer slid back home, it clicked when it was shut entirely, causing Jemma to frown and look down it. None of the others had clicked...a moment later there was another click inside of the armoire, and Jemma opened the doors of the piece of furniture quickly. She looked around, shoving jackets and coats out of the way, and then her eyes fell to the bottom of the armoire. There, in the bottom, a crack had appeared where a cut out panel had risen slightly.

She grabbed for the panel, pulling it open immediately, and her eyes lit up when she saw what was inside the hidden compartment. Files. A pile of files almost half a foot deep. She lifted the first one out and flipped through it, her eyes working furiously to skim for anything that stuck out. She didn’t have to look too hard. The folder she held was the entire medical file of a single patient...or...as she looked further, in this case a single subject.

Her mind latched onto keywords throughout the file, such as ‘testing’, ‘experiment’, ‘subject’, ‘terminated’...her stomach turned as she opened the next file in the assortment within the compartment with similar findings. Finally, in skimming the second file, a flash of red caught her eyes, and she stopped and flipped back to it. There, at the bottom of the piece of paper, was a stamp of a skull with six tentacles.

“Hydra…” She breathed.

Well, that answered that question.

The bio-chemist slapped the file shut, scooped up the rest, shut the compartment and the doors of the armoire, and quickly headed for the door after retrieving the warden’s file from the desk.

She opened the door, checked the hall, and finding it clear moved as quickly as she could down the hall. She needed to find Skye and they needed to get out of there. If this entire facility had become a Hydra facility, then she and Skye were fully behind enemy lines at that point.

The sound of voices ahead of her forced Jemma to a stumbling halt.

“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think receiving a christmas card from the warden will lighten their moods very much…”

“Ah, you’re probably right, Nelson.”

The warden, great! She really shouldn’t have been that surprised that he was returning to his office. After all, it was his office.

Jemma looked around, eyes wide with panic as she tried to find a new route of escape, and, not finding an alternate route, ended up just diving in through the nearest open door, which luckily led into a simple storage closet.

The bio-chemist could hear the two men getting closer, chatting idly with each other as they approached.

“How long?” The guard questioned.

“How long what?”

“How long do you think the girl will last?”

There was a pause as the warden considered the question, “I’ll bet you she won’t last an hour, not at the doctors hands. He really enjoys making it last as long as possible, but sometimes he gets a bit carried away, and I have a feeling he’ll get carried away with that one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, she’s just fascinating. Even if the serum did eventually affect her, it took longer than any of our subjects before her. He’ll want to get her open and find out the cause of that as soon as possible.”

“What’s Fredrich going to do with her?”

“He’ll move her from the infirmary to one of the cells. We’ll throw another inmate in there with her, and wait for one of the other guards to find her and report it.”

“Won’t the other inmate...not be cooperative?”

“They won’t have any idea what’s going on. There’s a handful we can choose from that barely know what’s up or down in here…”

They’re voices trailed off as they passed the closet and moved further down the corridor to the warden’s office.

Jemma stared at the wall, her skin as pale as it possibly could get. A very small, extremely naive part of her mind was suggesting that maybe they were talking about someone else. It was a large prison, after all. But she knew there was only one person they could be talking about.

“Skye,” Jemma looked around the storage closet in a panic. What should she do? She wasn’t a specialist like May or Trip, she didn’t know what to do! She just needed to do something though, they were clearly going to kill her! Even if Skye had triggered the panic on her collar, or if Fitz had seen what was going on and had alerted them, Trip and May would still need to get there, which would not be immediate. And the infirmary...the infirmary was in the farthest wing of the prison from the exit, she knew from her studying of the layout of the prison beforehand.

She stashed the files into a box full of rolls of toilet paper and then looked for something she could use as a weapon. Her eyes landed on a metallic dustpan. Okay...it wasn’t much at all, but it was something, and they apparently didn’t just keep pointy objects lying around free for the taking. She grabbed it, took a deep breath, and then moved out of the storage closet and back into the corridor. At least the cleaning tool was dense.

Jemma’s mind ran over the layout of the prison again, trying to figure out her location in relation to the infirmary and then, deciding on the best, most direct course for her to take she set off on her rescue mission.


	15. Chapter 15

She needed to get to Skye. That was the only thing that mattered. She didn’t care about her cover anymore, she didn’t even really care about the files. None of it would matter if Skye was killed. That was never part of the plan, but then you never planned to have a member of your team die.

No.

Skye wouldn’t die. Jemma wouldn’t let them kill her. This mission wasn’t worth the life of one of their own. A few months ago, maybe she wouldn’t have been so quick to rush to Skye’s aid, not just because Skye and her wouldn’t have been as close as they had become, but because she was an entirely different person a few months ago than to who she was in that moment, just like she was an entirely different person than who she was five years ago. She had experienced, been through, and learned so much since joining Coulson’s team, and one thing always stuck out to her, time and time again. They were a team. They stuck together, they watched out for each other, and they never left each other behind. Even if Skye didn’t mean more to her than just a teammate, she could have never imagined just leaving her there, sitting idly by in a utility closet, twiddling her thumbs while she waited for agents Trip and May to come to their rescue.

The bio-chemist ducked into a staircase when she heard footsteps approaching her direction. Maybe she didn’t care about her cover anymore, but she still couldn’t get caught. If she got caught, she highly doubted they would conveniently take her to Skye, and even if they did what was she supposed to do then? Right now she had the upperhand with the element of surprise on her side, but that was all she had. She had no idea how to escape handcuffs or any other sort of restraints. If she was caught and brought to Skye, then they would both die. Jemma paused. That would be better than allowing Skye to die alone…

The girl shook her head roughly. No. Neither of them was going to die that day.

None of this was worth it.

Vaguely, as Jemma resumed her careful progress to the infirmary of the prison, she wondered how none of the alarms had yet been triggered. She wasn’t skilled enough to know to have been avoiding security cameras, and by the time she had realized that security cameras were, in fact, a thing, she had been staring into one like a deer caught in the headlights. But an alarm never went off. No mob of guards ever came running. She wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, of course, but she wasn’t unaware that it was unusual.

With remembering that there were security cameras, she remained aware of them as she continued her approach to the infirmary. She didn’t want to push her luck and just start wandering freely in sight of them, just waiting for the second that luck ran out, but she did move perhaps a bit more quickly.

Finally, Jemma reached the infirmary. No one was lingering in the corridor, which at first she thought was odd, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized the fact that there weren’t supposed to be any prisoners anywhere near this part of the prison unaccompanied, and if the facility was as short-staffed as Coulson had mentioned, they wouldn’t waste their resources guarding empty wings of the building.

She approached the door slowly from the side, hearing indecipherable noises coming from within. And then she was a step away and she heard it. The sound of someone screaming. Though very muffled, it was unmistakable, and the sound caused Jemma’s heart to drop, her stomach to flip, and a fire to light deep within her. That fire was replaced by a kind of darkness as her mind registered the familiarity of the voice--though she didn’t even need that to know who it could have been. Her fingers tightened around the handle of the dustpan, not even caring how ridiculous it was going to be for her to burst into the room wielding the thing.

Her body had just made the decision to make its move into the room when the static-screech of a radio made her hesitate. Skye’s voice died, and another voice spoke a few moments later, “Something’s going on at the entrance, Doctor. All prisoners are being returned to their cells and bunks and they’re requesting all personnel….”

“Go,” A second voice responded, “Just come back when you’re done.”

Someone was approaching the door and Jemma looked around wildly for somewhere to hide. No other rooms were close enough, and the rest of the corridor was completely void, so, Jemma pressed herself as closely to the wall next to the door’s hinges as she could and prayed that the door would open outward instead of inward, and that the man leaving would head down the corridor in the same direction Jemma had come--therefore not walking straight past her.

It turned out, luck was very much on her side, because that was exactly what happened. The infirmary door opened suddenly, barely stopping two inches from hitting Jemma, and the man leaving turned the opposite way from her and, after swinging the door shut without looking, headed down the corridor.

Eyes wide, Jemma breathed a silent sigh of relief, watching him go down the corridor out of the corner of her eye, but not moving until he had turned out of sight.

It had sounded as though there had only been two people in the room, then. The ‘doctor’ and the guard who had just left.

A doctor. Doctor. A rage formed inside of Jemma. How dare he even consider himself in any way a doctor when he was partaking in such...such atrociously horrific actions!

Before Jemma’s mind could process the fact that her body was moving, her hand had already reached for the doorknob and was turning it carefully, silently.

Within the ‘infirmary’--Jemma found upon opening the door that the room was hardly fit to be called as such--Skye was bound to a chair bolted to the floor, a cloth wrapped around her head tight enough that it forced its way into her mouth and kept her from yelling out too loudly. Her head drooped towards the floor, her hair falling in front of her face, and from across the room Jemma couldn’t tell if she was awake or not.

The ‘doctor’ was in front of her, and the light glinted off the scalpel in his right hand, and some other utensil Jemma didn’t even recognize was in his left hand.

Blood dripped from Skye’s arms to the floor, and a trail of the dark liquid trailed down her neck from her face and stained the prison uniform that the inmates were forced to wear. From where Jemma was, that was the extent of the damage the bio-chemist could see, but it was enough to fuel her forward without hesitation, her grip tightening around the dustpan until it practically hurt.

“Now that we’re alone, would you care to share anything with me, Miss?” The doctor leaned closer, lifting the scalpel, “After all, It’s just you and I.”

“No!” Jemma was the one to respond, and Skye’s interrogator straightened and whirled around in surprise from the voice behind him, “It’s just you and I!”

She swung the dustpan two-handed, slamming the flat of it so hard against his head that it made her teeth chatter. As he crumpled to the floor, the scientist vowed, “You are not going to lay another finger on her.”

Normally, maybe she would feel a pang of regret for causing someone else harm like that. Normally, she hated to cause harm to anyone else. Never before in her life had she ever struck another person and not felt some sort of sorrow over it.

For the first time in her life, pure rage had fueled her actions, and for the first time in her life, she felt no regret for injuring another person like that.

“Skye…” Jemma rushed over to the other girl, dropping the dustpan as she crouched down in front of the hacker and carefully, gingerly tilted her head back so that she could see her face and reached up to pull the gag away from her mouth. The left side of the girl’s face was a mess, there really was no nice way to put it. Her cheek was a throbbing red, her bottom lip was swollen around a cut, and both her lips were split in multiple spots, her nose was bleeding but didn’t appear broken, there was a gash on her forehead above her eyebrow, and her left eye would most certainly be transitioning into an angry black eye at some point.

She was awake at least, she had simply lacked the energy to raise her head before, and when her eyes landed on Jemma she visibly relaxed, and the pain that had been clouding her eyes was almost entirely replaced by relief.

“What...took you so long?” Skye managed to get out, a weak smile playing across her injured lips.

Jemma couldn’t even bring herself to play Skye’s game as her eyes continued to inspect the other girl’s body and the extent of her injuries. The collar around her neck hadn’t been removed, but there were burns on her skin beneath it, electrical burns, not severe but definitely not comfortable. There were multiple more burns across Skye’s arms and a number of gashes that had been cut with surgical precision, which were still bleeding heavily. Tentatively, the bio-chemist reached her hands behind Skye’s neck to find the hidden latch that would allow her to remove it--Fitz had designed it to appear complex to remove, as to play upon the charade that Skye couldn’t remove it on her own, when it reality Skye could have taken it off whenever she chose. Once the collar was off, Jemma tried to trigger the panic, but there was no response from the collar, and a quick inspection showed that the circuitry had been fried and Jemma’s anger began to rise again as the evidence she was being presented with began to form a scene in her head.

“It’s not...that bad…” Skye muttered as the scientist remained completely silent throughout her inspection. She wasn’t dead, so it couldn’t be that bad, though, as much as she tried not to dwell on it, there had been times she had almost wished the psychotic doctor had just killed her. She wouldn’t give up so easily. She would never give up that easily, and maybe her body was begging for her to put an end to the pain, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, especially when Jemma finally met her gaze again and Skye saw all the emotions there. The anger, the sorrow, the guilt, but most of all the relief and joy that Skye was still alive.

“No, I suppose it’s not,” Jemma finally agreed as she rose and walked over to began inspecting the cupboards and drawers of the room, looking for bandages to put on Skye’s arms.

Skye’s head pressed against the back of the chair and her eyes slid shut as she asked, “How did you know I was here?”

The bio-chemist returned with antiseptic and a roll of self-adhesive bandages.

“I had snuck into the warden’s office, and he and a guard were talking about you when they returned.”

“Were you caught?”

Jemma gave Skye a look, and when Jemma didn’t speak up Skye opened her eyes to look at her and saw that look.

“Oh, right, I guess you weren’t if you’re here…”

“I can’t find anything to use to clean your cuts with exactly, so I have to just pour this directly on...it’s going to sting a bit,” Jemma warned, her face a mask of apology for having to cause Skye any more harm.

Skye eyed the antiseptic bottle warily, hesitating as her memory replied the intensified pain she had been caused due to whatever it had been that had been injected into her system. Her body was still hurting more than was normal due to the residual traces of it that hadn’t yet worn off.

“Can’t...can’t you just bandage me up?” Skye asked, turning a pleading look to Jemma. She wasn’t particularly fond of antiseptics on a normal day, let alone the idea of the pain they caused right then.

“Skye…-”

“Jemma, please,” The pure look of pleading in Skye’s eyes, mixed with the way her voice sounded as though it were on the verge of cracking broke Jemma’s heart and she put the antiseptic bottle down immediately.

Jemma expertly wrapped Skye’s arms up before she moved on to find some way to free the hacker’s wrists and ankles from the chair. She eventually was left with the only option of searching the ‘doctor’s’ pockets--who was still out cold on the floor for the moment--which she did as carefully as was humanly possible. He had a ring of keys in his right breast pocket, and she quickly pulled them away and returned to Skye and began testing them, one by one, as quickly as she could on the locks binding her.

Finally, the handcuffs were off Skye’s wrists, and Jemma repeated the tedious process with Skye’s ankles when she found that the same key didn’t unlock them.

Carefully, Jemma helped Skye from the chair. It wasn’t so painful to stand, neither of her legs had been injured in any way, but she was just so weak that it was surprisingly, infuriatingly, difficult.

“Are Trip and May on their way?” Skye asked as Jemma slid her arm around Skye’s waist and prodded the other girl to rest her arm across her shoulders.

“I...don’t know…” Jemma admitted, “The collar’s been destroyed…” Her voice trailed off as she remembered the security cameras and how none of the alarms had been triggered, and a flare of hope lit up inside of her, “I think that Fitz might have seen something on the cameras though.”

Skye nodded as she rested against Jemma, who adjusted her own weight to better balance the both of them, gaze dropping to the floor to make sure she didn’t step on Skye’s feet.

“So…how long’s the walk from here to the exit- wait. Did you find anything?” The hacker turned her head to look at Jemma suddenly.

“Skye, it doesn’t matter if I did. We’re getting you out of here, now,” The scientist responded.

“You aren’t going anywhere!”

Both girls looked up suddenly to see the ‘doctor’ rising to his feet, a furious expression on his face, the scalpel he’d been holding previously once again held tightly in his palm.

“So there’s two of you? Wonderful!” He grinned as his eyes fell on Jemma, looking her up and down, “And you look like you might break a bit easier than your friend. Even better.”

Skye moved to step in front of Jemma, but the scientist beat her to the punch, sliding out from beneath Skye’s arm to stand in front of the hacker protectively.

“I won’t let you touch her,” Jemma stated, the determination in her voice unwavering. The man laughed as he took a step forward.

“I don’t care about her anymore,” He responded, “I don’t need her anymore. I just need to have her disposed of, which I can do oh so easily once I’ve gotten what I need from you.”

The man lunged forward, his steps somewhat uneven from the fuzzy state of his head due to the blow Jemma had inflicted upon it.

“Jemma!” The scientist felt Skye’s hand tighten on her arm, and she knew the hacker was going to try and move her out of the way so that she dodged the attack and the crazed doctor’s momentum carried him past her, and into Skye instead, but Jemma wouldn’t budge, and Skye was too weak to actually force her out of the way.

The world suddenly seemed to stop, but it didn’t pause with the man impaling the scalpel into Jemma. There was just a moment’s hesitation in time, and then everyone resumed as normal, only now the man was stumbling forward, clear pain and confusion distorting his expression as his attack was foregone in favor of trying to keep from falling. He didn’t succeed. His entire body had become frozen, and he had no ability to keep himself from slamming into the tiled floor at Jemma’s feet. The bio-chemist’s eyes rose and she could have sobbed she was so relieved by the sight that greeted her.

“May.”

The older agent stepped over to the girls quickly, her hand wielding the icer lowering to her side, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Skye is less so…” Jemma stepped aside to reveal the hacker to the specialist, and May’s brow furrowed in anger when she saw the state Skye was in, though clearly not directed at the hacker as the older woman’s gaze flicked over to the sorry heap of a man lying on the floor for a split-second before her attention returned to the task at hand, not allowing herself any amount of time to linger on the possibility of any kind of revenge.

“Can you walk?”

“Not super well,” Skye responded slowly and May immediately moved to Skye’s side opposite Jemma.

“We need to move as quickly as possible.”

Jemma remembered something suddenly as she and May began the task of shuffling Skye as quickly as they could out of the infirmary, “The files!”

Both May and Skye looked at the bio-chemist, and she quickly went on, “I found files documenting the experimentation going on in this facility.”

“Where are they?”

“In a closet near the warden’s office…” Jemma replied, a bit upset that she wasn’t able to give May a more exact location. Apparently, that information was good enough because May reached up to press the button on the commlink in her ear and stated quickly, “Trip, I have Skye and Jemma. There are files in a supply closet, quadrant D.”

There was a pause as May lowered her hand, and then she nodded, “Trip is handling them. We’re getting you two out, now.”


	16. Chapter 16

“How’s Skye?”

“Fine.”

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

Coulson watched the bio-chemist closely, worry flashing through his eyes at her vague answers.

“Jemma…”

“I’m fine. I’m okay,” She cut him off, hurriedly trying to make amends for her answer that clearly hadn’t been adequate enough, “I’m just...it was...it was just...an experience. I’m not entirely sure that I can give you a proper answer to that question, sir, not so shortly afterwards.”

Coulson nodded, “That’s fair enough.”

“But Skye is fine, sir. The effects of whatever serum that man had injected into her while...interrogating her...have fully worn off, and she’s found that the pain of her injuries is considerably less than what her body was making her believe at the time. Of course, she shouldn’t take her injuries lightly and I have recommended multiple times that she receive more rest but she won’t listen to me and insists on continuing her regular training sessions with May as though nothing were wrong…”

Jemma’s voice trailed off before she could begin rambling any more as her eyes fell to her hands, but her mind was still carrying on the same track her voice had abandoned.

“What about the other serum?” Coulson asked, folding his hands together on top of his desk.

“I…” Jemma hesitated and then met Coulson’s gaze, looking a bit ashamed, “I don’t know. I can’t find any traces of it left in her system, and I can’t figure out what it did to her, exactly. I’ve gone over the files I retrieved from the warden’s office, over and over, and by all accounts she should either be dead or have gone insane by now, but I can’t find out why it didn’t have the same effect on Skye as it did with all of their other subjects,” Jemma paused, and then offered, “They might not have injected her with the same thing. In which case I have no way of finding out what it was they did inject her with, sir.”

Coulson nodded, “Perhaps. They might have used a placebo as well to use her as a baseline for whatever they were trying to accomplish.”

Jemma didn’t respond. That was an idea that she had already considered and dismissed, but she didn’t tell him that.

“If that’s all, sir…” Jemma’s voice trailed off and Coulson nodded again, holding a hand out to silently invite her to leave if she wished. The bio-chemist rose and headed for the door of his office.

“Jemma,” Jemma stopped and turned to look at the director inquiringly.

“I’m sorry that I put you and Skye in that position. I didn’t expect it to be that bad. But you did well. You both did well.”

The scientist nodded, offered a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, and then took her leave.

If they had done well, then why did she feel so...crummy?

So much had happened in such a short amount of time, and it still felt like she hadn’t done anything, hadn’t done enough, could have done so much more. Was this how it always felt? Was that a victory? Could that even be considered a victory? In the end, what had they accomplished, really? The evidence would be passed over to the government to do with it what they would, if anything.

“Jemma!”

The scientist was plucked from her thoughts as Skye suddenly appeared next to her, looping her arm through Jemma’s.

“Wanna watch something?”

“What?”

“A t.v. show.”

Jemma’s eyes narrowed skeptically, “What television show?”

“Orange is the New Black.”

“Seriously?”

Skye laughed, “Nah, I’m kidding. What about Sharknado?”

“Isn’t that movie supposed to be quite ridiculous?”

“So? That’s the point, c’mon it’ll be fun,” Skye tugged Jemma towards her pod and the bio-chemist followed without any real reluctance.


	17. Epilogue

Footsteps echoed down the corridors, seemingly ringing forever and coming from nowhere. But they did have a source, and the source was heading straight for the warden’s office.

The prison was unusually quiet. It hadn’t been cleared out after the recent events. First, if anything happened, an investigation would take place, and following the investigation then, perhaps, action would be taken to move prisoners elsewhere, but perhaps not.

A number of arrests had been made, and as long as those people were behind bars, the prison was a shining beacon of perfect reformation.

The footsteps hesitated outside of the door as the knob was turned and then proceeded inside.

“What happens now?”

The question came immediately, impatiently.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing? We need to do something.”

“Patience is a virtue, I highly doubt you haven’t heard that expression before, Doctor Zemo.”

“So we wait for them to catch on?”

“No, we wait for the fire to burn itself out.”

The doctor in the black uniform and purple tie stood in front of the desk within the warden’s office, his right arm in a sling, but otherwise looking to be in perfect health.

“How do you know it will burn out and won’t just light a fuse?”

“There’s no fuse to light. Nothing leads back to you or I.”

“They know what I look like.”

“Looks can be altered. You’ve done it before.”

“Yes, and it wasn’t particularly a pleasant or quick exchange.”

“Well, then it’s a good thing we’ve compensated for time needed for such things.”

“What about Hydra? When they find out their name has been plastered onto those files, they will come searching for the person responsible for it.”

“Hydra is nothing. A snake beneath our boot that will soon be crushed.”

“What happened to the warden?”

“The warden was arrested for a number of reasons that I was far too busy to actually memorize all of. It’s quite astonishing how much he’s responsible for really, you would think he had almost been set up.”

“So that’s it?”

“For now.”

“And the point of all of this…?”

“Let the investigation come. Let everything blow over. And in the end we will come up with a blank slate and new record. Why run when you can clear the board?”

Doctor Zemo scoffed, but didn’t argue.

“Were you able to find anything out at all?”

“The one girl, the one masquerading as Sealy, she remained remarkably silent. But I did get a name. She called her accomplice-”

“The one that knocked you out with the dustpan?”

“Jemma. She called her accomplice Jemma,” The man in the black suit narrowed his eyes in annoyance.

“Good. Find out who she is.”

The doctor nodded and turned to leave but stopped, “I’ve been meaning to ask, how did you know she wasn’t Tanya Sealy?”

“She mentioned not having anything to compare her time in prison to. Tanya Sealy was betrayed by the corporation she was employed by a few years ago and locked up, much in a similar fashion as to what has gone on in our own facility. It’s why she went ‘freelance’ more recently, once she broke out. I presume she was actually acting out a vendetta when she was captured.”

“You would think the girl would have known that?”

“No one knows that except Tanya Sealy and those responsible for her earlier imprisonment.”

“You worked at that corporation?”

“No. But Tanya Sealy’s path and my own have crossed before in the past, though not directly. That just happened to be quite poor luck on the girl’s part. She did a rather superb job otherwise.”

“Well, that’s good. I’m going to return to the infirmary. We’re receiving a new inmate tomorrow that should provide interesting results, and I’m keen to prepare,” Doctor Zemo turned around and headed for the door and left without another word.

At the desk, a nameplate sat, newly engraved and shining.

Dr Herbert Wyndham

Warden


End file.
